You're dead on regarding the noise level on Slashdot. If anyone knows of any technical/news forums of greater caliber (other than this fine establishment), I'd love to learn of them.

To me, Slashdot appears to have an annoyingly high ratio of Python/Java zealots. This is not to knock on their languages of choice, but "karma-whoring" (in Slashdot terminology) by uttering the same old tired "Perl is unreadable" logic is quite out of hand. They also tout Ruby with such prevalence, that I think no one on Slashdot has actually used it. They protesteth too much.

So what is the reasoning behind these lunatics? I rarely seeing Lisp being berated for ('s and )'s., and if anything, I've seen more badly written "C" than any other language. Why? It's because I've read more C code than any other language. Bad coders come in all forms.

I'll have to check out the book though. TPJ died shortly before I really started to want to read it, and if anything Perl is more conducive to quality articles because there is so much you can do with it.