Two new interesting books are now available. The shipping time for them seems a little long. Must be popular reading at the moment.

“Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs” (Mark Jason Dominus)

A friend mentioned that this was a Perl book he was looking forward to reading. I’ve not thought of Perl as a functional programming language. It’s ugliness as a language tend to muddy those aspects of it. At some point, I’m reading this book to see how functional programming is colored through a pair of Perl colored glasses.

“Java In A Nutshell (In a Nutshell)” (David Flanagan)

The 5th edition of this classic book. I learnt to program Java using the 1st/2nd? edition of this book. Looks like I’ll use this to learn the new language features in Java 1.5. Also, It’s now 1000 friggin pages long. How bloated has Java gotten??? :) From Amazon’s product description, it looks like the girth of the book is due to the coverage of the tools and frameworks supporting Java. That’s the right thing to do because the tools and frameworks are the most important part of the platform. I hope they cover some of what I want to look at.

Looking forward to reading both of these books…