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"Programming Perl" by Larry Wall sits on a bookshelf across from my bed. When I wake up it's usually the first book my eyes alight on though I don't use Perl much these days. It still brings back fond memories and is an inspired work to this day. Larry Wall was a linguist and Perl will always look like sigilitis if you don't take half an hour to grok context. Perl particularly appeals to those who see beauty in regular expressions. Those that hate/avoid regular expressions usually hate Perl. Perl was my first real programming language after I found a reference to regular expressions in the Find & Replace section of a Dreamweaver manual. There was a reference to Jeffrey Friedl's brilliant work "Mastering Regular Expressions" which was part of the O'Reilly Perl library and that led me to Perl. Happy days. Much better than fighting my way through the thicket of front-end Javascript.