Welcome to the art of computer programming and to the new Perl 6 language. This will probably be the first published books using Perl 6 (or one of the first), a powerful, expressive, malleable and highly extensible programming language. But this book is less about Perl 6, and more about learning how to write programs for computers.

This book is intended for beginners and does not require any prior programming knowledge, but it is my hope that even those of you with programming experience will benefit from reading it.

This aim of this book is not primarily to teach Perl 6, but instead to teach the art of programming, using the Perl 6 language. After having completed this book, you should hopefully be able to write programs to solve relatively difficult problems in Perl 6, but my main aim is to teach computer science, software programming, and problem solving rather than solely to teach the Perl 6 language itself.

This means that I will not cover every aspect of Perl 6, but only a (relatively large, but yet incomplete) subset of it. By no means is this book intended to be a reference on the language.

It is not possible to learn programming or to learn a new programming language by just reading a book; practicing is essential. This book contains a lot of exercises. You are strongly encouraged to make a real effort to do them. And, whether successful or not in solving the exercises, you should take a look at the solutions in the Appendix, as, very often, several solutions are suggested with further discussion on the subject and the issues involved. Sometimes, the solution section of the Appendix also introduces examples of topics that will be covered in the next chapter–and sometimes even things that are not covered elsewhere in the book. So, to get the most out the book, I suggest you try to solve the exercises as well as review the solutions and attempt them.