I wrote a book called Higher-Order Perl, which is an example of this: I read a lot of books about languages like Lisp, ML, and Haskell, and learned techniques from those languages. Then I tried to apply the same techniques in Perl instead. Some of the techniques didn't work, or didn't make sense, but others did work, and most Perl programmers didn't know them, so it was a useful book.
-- Mark Jason Dominus