Wow! Both the latest edition of the Icon Programming Language Reference and The Implementation of The Icon Language book are available as free downloads. Go ahead, download and indulge - Icon is simply a beautiful little language with very interesting features. Many things in Icon have always appealed to me much more than in Perl - regular expressions are namely not the only way to analyze strings. String scanning in Icon is at least as powerful, but much more elegantly designed and far less cryptic. Of course I have the books in print form at home, but since they're no longer available in paper form, the download is certainly a good solution. And since they're free - in the sense of public domain - it's also a really cheap opportunity.