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This is Moritz Lenz's second book release. One could argue that you have to tackle the first one, "Perl 6 Fundamentals" before progressing to this one. This is not the case, however, as the book is written in such a way that it can be consumed independently without requiring any kind of knowledge in Perl 6.Saying that, it does however dedicate a chapter to getting started with Per l 6, just enough to ready you to work with its regular expressions.That aside, the author does indeed go into detail explaining the Perl 6 features used in the examples.
A question that I also posed to Moritz was whether the knowledge obtained from studying this book is transferable to Perl5 or to other languages, or, is it rather unique to Perl6?
Moritz's reply was that
the general skills/knowledge is transferable, but p6 regexes and grammars offer much awesome stuff that other implementations simply don't have.
So while the material is only applicable to Perl 6, since its implementation and the tricks you can pull off go beyond PCRE, previous experience with regular expressions in general will certainly make the material easier to follow.
About the author himself, Moritz is a well known figure of Perl and especially Perl 6, being a contributor to the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler as well as the initiator of the official Perl 6 documentation project. I Programmer's first contact with him was back in 2012(!) when I interviewed him about "Perl 6 and Parrot", at a time when Parrot was Perl 6's primary VM and well ahead of any plans for Rakudo.
The interview does not stop there though, but also investigates the differences, cultural or otherwise between Perl 5 and Perl 6 as well as the then yet-to-be-announced regular expression capabilities in Perl 6. It's worth recalling relevant snippets of this interview:
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