Programming Books

5 Excellent Free Books to Learn Raku

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

Raku is a member of the Perl family of programming languages. Formerly known as Perl 6, it was renamed in October 2019. Raku introduces elements of many modern and historical languages. Compatibility with Perl was not a goal, though a compatibility mode is part of the specification.

Raku offers many features such as:

  • Object-oriented programming including generics, roles and multiple dispatch;
  • Functional programming primitives, lazy and eager list evaluation, junctions, autothreading and
  • hyperoperators (vector operators);
  • Parallelism, concurrency, and asynchrony including multi-core support;
  • Definable grammars for pattern matching and generalized string processing;
  • Optional and gradual typing.

Raku is multi-paradigmatic. It supports Procedural, Object Oriented, and Functional programming.

Read more about Perl in our compilation of the best free books for Perl.


1. Raku Guide by Naoum Hankache

Raku Guide

This document is intended to give you a quick overview of the Raku programming language. For those new to Raku, it should get you up and running.

This guide covers operators, variables, functions and mutators. Later chapters cover loops and conditions, I/O, subroutines, functional programming, classes & objects, and exception handling. The guide finishes with chapters on regular expressions, Raku modules, Unicode, parallelism, concurrency and asynchrony, and native calling interface.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Read the book


2. Raku One-Liners by Andrew Shitov

Raku - One-Liners RakuOne-Liners: Getting the most of Raku’s expressive syntax for your daily routines introduces the reader to many short programs, so short that they can be written in a single line of code.

The seven chapters will guide you through Raku’s syntax elements that help to create short, expressive, but still useful programs.

It is assumed that the reader knows the basics of the Raku programming language and understands programming in general.

Read the book


3. Think Raku: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Laurent Rosenfeld, with Allen B. Downey

Think Perl 6Think Raku is an introduction to computer science and programming intended for people with little or no experience.

This aim of this book is not primarily to teach Raku, but instead to teach the art of programming, using the Raku language. After having  completed this book, you should hopefully be able  to write programs to solve relatively difficult problems in Raku, but the author’s main aim is to teach computer science, software programming, and problem solving rather than solely to teach the Raku language itself.

Think Raku is a free book available under a Creative Commons license.

Read the book


Next page: Page 2 – Perl 6 at a Glance and more

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Raku Guide and more
Page 2 – Perl 6 at a Glance and more


All books in this series:

Free Programming Books
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AssemblyAs close to writing machine code without writing in pure hexadecimal
AwkVersatile language designed for pattern scanning and processing language
BashShell and command language; popular both as a shell and a scripting language
BASICBeginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
CGeneral-purpose, procedural, portable, high-level language
C++General-purpose, portable, free-form, multi-paradigm language
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ClojureDialect of the Lisp programming language
ClojureScriptCompiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript
COBOLCommon Business-Oriented Language
CoffeeScriptTranscompiles into JavaScript inspired by Ruby, Python and Haskell
CoqDependently typed language similar to Agda, Idris, F* and others
CrystalGeneral-purpose, concurrent, multi-paradigm, object-oriented language
CSSCSS (Cascading Style Sheets) specifies a web page’s appearance
DGeneral-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax
DartClient-optimized language for fast apps on multiple platforms
DylanMulti-paradigm language supporting functional and object-oriented coding
ECMAScriptBest known as the language embedded in web browsers
EiffelObject-oriented language designed by Bertrand Meyer
ElixirRelatively new functional language running on the Erlang virtual machine
ErlangGeneral-purpose, concurrent, declarative, functional language
F#Uses functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming methods
FactorDynamic stack-based programming language
ForthImperative stack-based programming language
FortranThe first high-level language, using the first compiler
GoCompiled, statically typed programming language
GroovyPowerful, optionally typed and dynamic language
HaskellStandardized, general-purpose, polymorphically, statically typed language
HTMLHyperText Markup Language
IconWide variety of features for processing and presenting symbolic data
JArray programming language based primarily on APL
JavaGeneral-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, high-level language
JavaScriptInterpreted, prototype-based, scripting language
JuliaHigh-level, high-performance language for technical computing
KotlinMore modern version of Java
LabVIEWDesigned to enable domain experts to build power systems quickly
LaTeXProfessional document preparation system and document markup language
LispUnique features - excellent to study programming constructs
LogoDialect of Lisp that features interactivity, modularity, extensibility
LuaDesigned as an embeddable scripting language
MarkdownPlain text formatting syntax designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write
Objective-CObject-oriented language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to C
OCamlThe main implementation of the Caml language
PascalImperative and procedural language designed in the late 1960s
PerlHigh-level, general-purpose, interpreted, scripting, dynamic language
PHPPHP has been at the helm of the web for many years
PostScriptInterpreted, stack-based and Turing complete language
PrologA general purpose, declarative, logic programming language
PureScriptSmall strongly, statically typed language compiling to JavaScript
PythonGeneral-purpose, structured, powerful language
QMLHierarchical declarative language for user interface layout - JSON-like syntax
RDe facto standard among statisticians and data analysts
RacketGeneral-purpose, object-oriented, multi-paradigm, functional language
RakuMember of the Perl family of programming languages
RubyGeneral purpose, scripting, structured, flexible, fully object-oriented language
RustIdeal for systems, embedded, and other performance critical code
ScalaModern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based language
SchemeA general-purpose, functional language descended from Lisp and Algol
ScratchVisual programming language designed for 8-16 year-old children
SQLAccess and manipulate data held in a relational database management system
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ValaObject-oriented language, syntactically similar to C#
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