I haven't done any book blogging, but I thought I might give it a whirl. A few weeks ago I finished a very good science fiction book The Mote In God's Eye. I'm reasonably certain I had heard good things about this book before I decided to buy it, but it would have been some time ago and the my recollection of such things is poor. I'm a big fan of the works of both Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven (both individually and as collaborators). Among other of their works I had previously read their fantastic Lucifer's Hammer back about 6 or 7 years ago.

I'm not big on summaries so here is a very simple one: a millenium from now humankind has colonized much of the galaxy but has found no evidence of non-human intelligent life. Then one day an alien probe appears near one of the colonies. The rest of the book is about the voyage to the aliens home planet and about the cultural and physical differences between the aliens and the humans. Here's a hint: the humans and aliens are very different and many problems are caused due their misunderstanding and mistrust of one another. The book attempts to adhere, with some exceptions, to a realistic physical universe. This is not a fantasy, but a work of hard science fiction.

This is an excellent book. I recommend it highly.

I think this is exactly right. Knowing about perldoc and how to use perldoc is very important to becoming a good Perl developer (and, really, learning the documentation system for any language will be important). Two things that are not mentioned in the article are the '-m' and '-l' arguments. I use '-m' every single day. It is very useful for quickly viewing the code for a module, and, thus, it is a useful tool for seeing how others have solved particular problems. '-l' I use less frequently but it is useful for finding the absolute location of the module on the file system.