Today two books arrived, one after another, both payments in exchange for Perl help I had given some time ago. I like to mix books for pleasure with books I can use working as a freelance Perl programmer, and the books that arrived today are a good example of this.
The first book to arrive today was Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson. I am quite a fan of Donaldon's work, not only the fantasy series which are outstanding in my opinion, but also the Gap series, which is science fiction, and in my opinion very good science fiction.
I had already received "Runes of the Earth", the first book in the "Final Chronicles" series, as part of the same help I had given last June, and had already read the story. To be honest, I had expected more from "Runes of the Earth"; it was a bit too slow to me. Moreover I missed the magic, the wonder/horror, and travelling so present in the previous two series. It's still there, but it's almost like it's not important; like the focus is more on thoughts, ideas, and dialogs. But maybe the slower pace is because it's the first book out of a series of four, or I had different expectations. Or both. Anyway, the summary at the beginning of "Runes of the Earth", of the previous two series, is excellent written, and was able to bring back many fond memories of those earlier series.
More recently I helped someone out with debugging a web application written in Catalyst. Since I hadn't used Catalyst before, but had it on my "have to check this out" list for quite some time, I had decided that the only right thing to do was to ask for the book on Catalyst in return.
The book has the following chapters:
Browsing through the book I got the expression that it's exactly the kind of book I like: well written, short but clear, to the point chapters, all task-based. It made me want to fire up Emacs, and giving Catalyst a try right away. But that has to wait until I've finally configured subversion on my Dell Vostro 200 running Ubuntu.