Definitely. I'd say "Programming Perl" is a literary masterpiece. Larry Wall's genius was selling Perl as a literate, witty, expressive antidote to all the Java

Definitely. I'd say "Programming Perl" is a literary masterpiece. Larry Wall's genius was selling Perl as a literate, witty, expressive antidote to all the Java and C++ cruft of the late 90s (Perl 5). "Programming Perl" should be read alongside "Mastering Regular Expressions" which is another masterpiece. I think Ruby and Clojure are the only language cultures that come close to engaging the whole brain the way Perl 5 did when it was popular. However, while each has a couple of shining stars (Ruby: Matz & DHH, Clojure: Rich Hickey) they don't compare with the sheer number of stars who made up the Perl 5 cast of the early 2000s (Larry Wall, "The Damian" Conway, Chromatic, Curtis Poe, Lincoln Stein, Randall Schwartz, John Orwant, Simon Cozens, Tom Christiansen, Nat Torkington & many more). That really was an entertaining community to be part of and is, like disappearing bookshops, sorely missed. Perl lost a lot of mindshare to Python, famed for its boring predictability and crippled lambdas which the Perl 5 community would never have tolerated. If you want programming to inspire you the way O'Reilly's catalogue of Perl books did in the late 90s/early 2000s I'm not sure there's much apart from Matz and Rich Hickey's work. Their lectures are inspiring but their written output is limited. Go read "Programming Perl" - it's timeless.