> Seriously Clever for A 10 year old book on perl basics is probably pushing it.

Why is the age of this book relevant? It's not an overview of the basics. it's a 500+ page exploration of Perl's functional programming features, a topic rarely (if ever) covered in this depth.

The other day I surprinsingly found more praise for HOP from a coder I admire: http://books.google.com.br/books?id=2kMIqdfyT8kC&pg=PT89&lpg...

Time to re-read it, because when I first read it, I had to skim some parts. Probably applies to Python.

That's like calling SICP a book on Scheme basics.