Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: A great book for learning, regardless of your background.
Comment: One highly ranked reviewer exaggerates that this book is only loved by expert Unix gurus and then steers you toward another title. Check the other reviews for yourself and you'll see this is a falsehood.
While Perl has its origins as the 'toolbox for Unix', this book is great for students learning Perl on ANY platform. I've been using the examples in this edition with the ActiveState distribution (available for AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows) on Windows and haven't had a single OS-related snag.
After trying several Perl books, all good mind you, this one's explanations, examples and exercises helped me finally get past Perl's reputation as a 'hairy' language and understand its beauty and efficiency for getting things done. It's clear from the quality of this book, that the authors have fine-tuned the content based on their years of experience teaching Perl, which they love.
I hope you use Amazon's "Look Inside" feature or browse a printed copy to decide which book is best for you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Read it again even if you've learned Perl
Comment: It's been a while since I introduced myself to Perl with the second edition of this book. A lot of time has gone between then and now, and I've become fairly confident that I have, in fact, learned Perl. Still, there's a lot of little things you can forget over the course of a few years. Might as well refresh myself now.
Yeah, I've forgotten a lot. Wow. Lots of little things that I forgot I could do, simply because I never needed to use them during that crucial gelling stage. This is a pretty good book, but my attention definitely wandered around the chapter on simple databases. Maybe the author could have swapped the last two chapters, since the "advanced" stuff like grep and map get used pretty much every day, while DBM files are at best used by a smaller lump of developers. But that's just my personal experience. Who knows?
It was worth reading, though. I think my Perl code will look a bit tighter and nicer than it has thanks to the little details that I missed the first time through.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Actually, it's pretty good for beginners...
Comment: I found this to be an excellent introduction to Perl. The examples and solutions and the end of each chapter are effective teaching techniques. You don't need to know much about unix, awk, grep etc. to benefit from the book (if you're curious you can look these things up, but you won't loose anything without doing so). I knew nothing about Perl to begin with and was quite happy with what I learned by the end of this book. My only complaint about the book is that it didn't go far enough; it should have covered objects, classes, modules, packages, etc. I can't penalize the authors for this because these topics are more advanced, but it certainly would have been great if they did (I find that "The Perl Cookbook" doesn't explain these particularly well). Incidentally, I think you get a mixed bag with the O'Reilly series; for example, I'm happy with this book but lukewarm about "The Perl Cookbook" and "Learning PHP 5". I hope Schwartz and Phoenix author something more advanced pretty soon.
(3rd Edition)
Customer Rating:
Summary: OUTSTANDING!!!!
Comment: Quite simply, this book blew me away.
"A computer book blew you away???" you are probably saying, but let's keep this in the context of the computer industry. When I opened up "Learning Perl" I knew nothing about Perl other than it was a very popular language that had a strong following. When I got done with this book I felt that I had a solid grasp of what Perl could do and how to do it.
What blew me away about this book more so than many other computer books is the exceptional writing.
EXCEPTIONAL.
Not good, not great, but above and beyond nearly anything I have read before. While reading this book, you feel like the Authors are in front of you teaching a class and you can tell it's material that they love. Never before have I opened a book about learning something and was engrossed enough to read it cover to cover. Without having to produce a 900 page manual that certainly very few people would delve into, Schwartz & Christiansen/Phoenix have written a book that makes learning Perl fun and it's a fantastic introduction or refresher for anyone that wants to use this great language.
***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not for experienced programmers
Comment: It's a good book for learning the very basic things about Perl, if you are just starting with programming languages, but it's too basic for those who already are programmers in other languages such as C.
Most of the book's content is covered more in-depth during the Programming Perl's first chapter.
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