I'm cramming through Learning Perl again (last time was back in 1997) to get up to speed for a potential gig. After 13 years of Cold Fusion, Java, PHP, Python, and after hearing Randall Schwartz talk on FLOSS Weekly about how Perl looks like line noise, I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. When I first read the 2nd edition I didn't know a bunch of things that I know now, and when I've flipped through it since then I haven't been motivated get past my old impressions. I can still see the potential for obfuscation (unintentional or otherwise), but the 5th edition has all these references to "your maintenance programmer", and how you don't have to format your code nicely but you really should. Perl's syntax is funky after the zen minimalism of Python, but it's kinda growing on me. <!-- SUMMARY_END -->