Customer Rating:  
Summary: All in all a good book, with poor writing style
Comment: My programming background is weak, but I found this book basic enough yet sufficiently comprehensive to write a fairly complicated program for text file parsing in a weekend.
Pros:Clear explanations and examples(albeit in the middle of a distracting, poor writing)
Cons: Very bad writing style, full of unnecessary and distracting footnotes and irrelevant "humor?". Book could have been condensed to 50% by eliminating irrelevant stuff.
Nevertheless, I found this to be better than "for dummies" and "by example", both of which I browsed and discarded almost immediately.
In my opinion this is a good book, but if you have more than 5 neurons in your brain after 4 or 5 days you will be ready to re-sell it and stick with "Programming Perl".
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great book for beginner's.
Comment: This book is excellent for those just learning programming without previous experience and even for those who already know another language. It explains the little details very well and leaves you understanding all that you have read. Perl is a great programming language and this book is perfect for learning the basics.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Second Edition is Better
Comment: This is a complete rewrite of the second edition, plus the addition of another author. The format is good for reference, if that's how you learn. But it takes away from the rather eloquent writing and by-example approach that Randal Schwartz has been doing. Randal is a wonderful writer, and the Second Edition is much more suitable, as it provides a follow-by-example method, building more complex issues as the book progresses. It's clear that Randal is a good teacher.I recommend anyone that really wants to learn perl, do so by using the Second Edition. While it may not have all the reference material available in the third, it does a wonderful job and will prepare you for more advanced learning, plus you can probably purchase the Second Edition now at a good discount.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Text, text and more text
Comment: I think I've finally found the right scripting language. After mucking around with korn and bourne and bourneagain shells, perl seems to offer the right tools for what I'm after. Though other scripting languages certainly must have their uses (both in scripting AND as a command shell) perl seems to be more suited for straight forward text processing. Mr. Schwartz' examples plainly are cartoonish, but just change fred, barney and wilma into members of your immediate family and you should have no problem with the examples. Yep, if you're in need of a way to plough through mega and giga bytes of text, here is the scripting solution. Here is (as far as I can tell) as good a way to learn the basics as any. Of course your mileage may vary. Thanks for an introductory book that doesn't treat me like the "For Dummies" kind of person that I probably am!
Customer Rating:
Summary: This is _the_ book with which to learn Perl.
Comment: There's a reason why this book has a nickname, like the Camel: just like Perl, and just like every true UNIX utility, it's small and it does one thing well. That one thing is teach Perl. Beginners and experienced programmers alike have found _Learning Perl_ to be simply the best book with which to learn this pathlogically eclectic language. And the reasons why _Learning Perl_ have become so popular are obvious upon inspection of the authors' personalities. Laced with humor and a general light-hearted attitude, this book lends a gentle aura to the process of learning one of the most rewarding computer languages available. Contrary to some opinions, the subject isn't dry -- unless you approach it with all of the enthusiasm and spirit of a piece of granite. Indeed, the beauty and freedom of Perl is made readily apparent herein. On the subject of this book not making a good reference: since when is a tutorial a reference? When you forget the capital of Colorado or how many provinces there are in Canada, do you go to a school to help you remember? No, you go to a library (or, if you've learned anything from this book, your Perl interface to a local DICT server). The same holds true for _Learning Perl_. It never set out to be a reference, so judging it as one just isn't fair. Besides -- if you need a reference, you have both the Perl electronic documentation (freely available both on the web and on any machine with Perl properly installed) and at least one book that covers the subject: _Programming Perl_, the title that I and many others have affectionately deemed "the Camel" (a suitably pathologically eclectic name for the definitive reference for a wonderfully pathologically eclectic language and philosophy).
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