Customer Rating:  
Summary: Good introduction to Perl
Comment: My group at work has been writing a number of scripts in Perl for our most recent project. So I wanted to familiarize myself with reading their code, as well as write some of my own. I found this book easy and fun to read, and it helped me get familiar with basic Perl features. I recommend this book to others who also would like to get a quick and easy introduction to writing Perl code.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a bit simplistic
Comment: If you know how to program (even a little bit) this is a quick and easy read. It introduces perl very well and is great if you are just starting perl. However, it's not one of those book that you refer to all the time. (That would be Programming Perl by Larry Wall) If you know someone with this book, as them to borrow it for the weekend and then if you like perl go buy "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall and give them back this book. It's not that it's bad, it's just not something you will refer to after reading it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to Perl
Comment: If you are having trouble getting into Perl this book provides a very smooth ramp to understanding the fundamentals. You won't become a Perl guru with it but you will be able to grasp the essentials and move on from there. If you are a full time programmer you should have Perl as part of your bag of tricks and this is a good way to learn it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Too Basic
Comment: Like many UNIX administrators, when I first worked with Perl, I bought this book but spent very little time with it. I soon moved on to other excellent books from O'Reilly and other publishers.After a 2-3 year hiatus from Perl, I needed to refresh my memory. Fortunately, I found this book quickly and gave it the time it deserves. I quickly realized that had I just taken the time to go through the tutorials in this book, I would have saved myself a great deal of time and effort. My advice to those learning Perl, give your ego a rest and do not go on to other books until you've gone through this one thoroughly.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good introduction, but not enough
Comment: I would have to admit I came to learning Perl with some negative bias. I had previously learned TCL and Python, and was a bit apprehensive about learning all the cryptic aspects of the language. In the end I was forced into learning the language for my work. In general, this book succeeds in introducing the language in a "... for Dummies" style, and I didn't find the book too difficult to read.The problems started when I started on my first Perl task: to maintain an already-written Perl program. Some important language aspects such as references are not covered. Further, for a non-reference book, the index is incomplete, for example the $# operator to obtain the last index in an array is not included in the index. This is a serious shortcoming, given that the book introduces closely-linked topics, such as using lists/arrays, across several sections throughout the book, In my opinion, this makes the book unusable for the beginner who knows that they have read about an aspect to the language, but then can't find it when needed. So in summary, to get you going, it serves as an good introduction to the language, but to start using Perl as a novice programmer, you will probably need something better.
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