Late Night PC

Learning Perl the Hard Way was a good read. Only took me a few hours and I feel like I have a good introduction to the language. As usual, I worked through the first few examples but rushed at the end. Allen Downey does some really fun stuff: Huffman coding and Markov Chains in short programs that show off the power of Perl. My favourite thing about the text though was that I got to skip all the redundant crap like explaining what a variable is. Learning Perl the Hard Way is aimed squarely at people who are already familiar with other programming languages. If you code in C then you'll be comfortable with this book.