More than a technical manual or aftermarket "teach yourself X in a wildly unrealistic amount of time" book, the "Camel Book" is a peek inside the quirky mind of Larry Wall, the man responsible for patch(1), rn(1), and, of course, perl(1). The book's opening sections, which discuss Larry's philosophy of natural language, comprise the best possible introduction to the mystery and rational elegance of programming--not as a stark, cut-and-dried binary world of Boolean yes or no, but as a human art as enthralling and fluid as humanity itself. It's a pretty good reference, too.

Steve Champeon