Phew! Finished it at last! You’d have to be seriously dedicated to work through the 24 chapters in this book at the rate of one hour each, even averaging over the whole thing. But it is good, and by the end I felt I’d got a fair grounding in the basics of Perl. At the end, though, it feels like you’ve run into a cliff – the last couple of chapters dealing with interactive templates are enough to boggle this mind at least. And with an earlier chapter skipping over the whole area of Perl objects, it left me only too conscious of how much I still don’t know (and that includes the last two chapters!). Never mind, the rest of it’s good stuff, and enough to get you happily scripting away in Perl.

Esther Dyson’s publicity says she has been dubbed "the First Lady of the Internet", so it’s probably my fault that I hadn’t heard of her until I saw a review of this book in the paper. Or perhaps it’s just that here in England we aren’t as wired-in as they are in the USA.

The book is subtitled "A design for living in the Digital Age" and it in Dyson sets out her views on the way the Internet and its associated technologies will develop and influence society over the next five to ten years. She deals with a range of current issues including work, education, privacy, security, and regulation.

Dyson is fundamentally optimistic about the future, seeing the solution to many problems through an enlightened combination of market economics and self-regulation where competition between providers ensures the successful thrive and the unsuccessful wither away. Attractive though her future may be, it is a big step – maybe too big – to see it coming about outside the priviledged educated elite of the USA and the developed West. Her future relies on consumers/ employees/ parents/ teachers who can make informed, participative choices and this seems a long way from the closed communities and rigorous censorship prevalent in many parts of the world.

She argues that the Internet transcends geographical boundaries in a way for which we have no precedent, and that it will be a powerful force for change. She tentatively floats the proposition that in cyberspace, governments themselves will "compete" for citizens’ membership and loyalty – if I do not like the laws of the country in which I base my cyber-business I can simply choose another jurisdiction.

Whether or not we believe that communities (and citizens) of the kind foreseen by Dyson will develop widely or only in favoured societies, this book is well worth reading. As we know, the only thing we can say with certainty about the future is that we can’t be certain how it will turn out. Dyson’s understanding and discussion of the issues, coupled with her knowledge of the way Internet technology is moving, make her predictions more likely than most to be at least partially accurate.

Her company is at http://www.edventure.com.