Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Perl Reference
Comment: This contains a lot of useful information and examples which go above and beyond the "basics" found in the extensive Perl man-pages.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Non Fiction
Comment: A really quite good introduction and how-to guide to the whacky and very cool and useful beast that is the Perl programming language. It certainly helped me when I decided to pick up the language for some of the useful internet programming tricks that it had. A book I would definitely recommend as a purchase. Not too many you could say that about currently.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Complete Reference, But Not For Beginners
Comment: Programming Perl, also known as "The Camel Book," is the ultimate reference guide, written by the creator of Perl, Larry Wall. As one might expect, this guide covers every nook and cranny of the Perl programming language. It's greatest strength is also it's greatest weakness: useful nuggets of information are buried everywhere throughout the text. This is a strength in that, when looking up a particular topic, you'll often stumble upon a useful morsel of information. It's a weakness in that you have to slog through often dry reading to find these hidden gems.
It should be noted that this book assumes a working knowledge of Unix, in addition to some previous programming experience. If you are new to programming, or just new to Perl, you should check out Learning Perl, Fourth Edition instead. It is a much easier read, and ranks in my mind among the most well written technical books. Programming Perl makes for a great second book, as well as a desktop reference.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Essential for lovers of Perl culture, recommended for the rest of us
Comment: Perl seems capable of evoking both rapturous adoration and abject disgust from those who are exposed to it. If your feelings are closer to the former than the latter, well, you probably own this book already, and you love it.
After all, The Camel consists of the God of Perl and two Perl demigods writing the definitive reference about Perl from top to bottom. What's not to love? In particular, if you've ever heard Larry Wall give a talk, you'll be able to spot his contributions: droll, parenthetical and punning.
For those of us who just like Perl (or even just have to work with it), it's not quite as essential as you might have been led to believe. In part this might be because the third edition is getting on a bit, and plenty of other good Perl books have emerged in the intervening time. And in part, it's because definitive tomes such as this one by definition contain large chunks that you don't need, where you'll spend most of your time just nodding and thinking 'yep, I already know that'.
But of course, there's always a few bits you didn't know, and that's where The Camel comes in handy. The first part of the book, which goes over the core of the language, is a must read in this respect. To be honest, I didn't find the explanations to be quite as cogent as what can be found elsewhere (e.g. Perl Best Practices or Advanced Perl Programming), but it's all in one place here.
In addition, beyond the core language, lots of other material is present, including: threading, details on Perl's internals, and a long list of Perl idioms and dos and don'ts. There's also the reference section, which covers the built in functions, and briefly outlines what's in the standard packages that come with Perl, which is also helpful, although in most cases I expect an internet search (or the perl man pages) is just as fast, and in the case of the standard library, provides more information.
On the one hand, I think you can get by without owning this. On the other you will not regret buying this book -- Perl has enough quirks that it's nice to have The Camel close to hand. Nice, but not essential.
Customer Rating:
Summary: It really isn't that good
Comment: The book is written by the creators of Perl, but the truth is that the book is not nearly as good as it's cracked up to be. It suffers from the "fish describing water" syndrome, where the authors find it hard to know what to talk about and what not to talk about.
The book definitely is useful, but it's not as useful as a book written by more skillful technical writers would have been. It's very "ivory towers" and it badly needs more simple example scripts rather than "head in the clouds" discussions.
Unfortunately a lot of people who want to be "macho" about computers will say that this book is much easier to understand and useable than it really is - they'd probably tell you about how wonderful the emperor's new clothes are too.
It's not a bad book, and it's definitely useful, but I'd recommend borrowing a copy of this book to have a good look at it before buying it.
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