Once this is out, I'll be interested in any well written guides or books, it has always felt like "the one that got away" to me.

Back in 2002 I had to choose between learning between Python and Perl for a project, but "everybody knew" Perl 5 was soon going to be replaced by a new shiny different Perl 6, so I chose Python.

It will be interesting to see where Perl can live and gain new users nowadays. Python has so much become the "default scripting language", and has so many bindings and libraries.