Customer Rating: 
Summary: Get the Llama
Comment: If you have previous procedural programming experience (C for example) and/or have a STRONG desire to learn Perl (but don't have Perl experience), this book is for you.If you do read the foreword, keep in mind that it's soley for your amusement. Beyond the foreword, the book takes a more serious approach to learning the basics of Perl but is still a far cry from the books that give you the feeling your mouth is full of sawdust. After reading through this book, expect to be comfortable with variables & literals (incl. strings)
arrays & hashes (associative arrays)
control structures (if/else, for, while, etc.) & functions(procedures)
simple I/O
basic regular expressions
file handling
and more... At the end you get a nice introductory treatment of CGI programming using Perl...an incentive to buy the Camel to learn
more advanced Perl incantations. =) The book is very professionally written-I didn't find many of those bugs/typos that so many books are infested with. Thanks Randal & Editors!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A good book when you start programming in Perl
Comment: Hi, I'm French and I work as a database administrator for an insurance company in Ireland. I started to use perl one year ago and the first book I bought was that one. It's a very easy book to read and to understand. At the end you can start writing programs or applications, and you can use CGI. It explains all the perl concepts on a very easy way and all the exercises allow us to understand Perl mechanisms very easily. If you want to start programming in Perl start with this book and I'm sure after you won't stop writing programs like me. My first book in Perl and sure one of the best to start with this language.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Top of the line
Comment: This is as good as it gets.The writing style is fun throughout, the chosen examples interesting, organization very well thought out, presentation clear. You pick it up and you will keep reading. The first chapter gives an overview of what the language can do via an example ("guess the secret word") which is developed more and more using more and more features of the language. In your average programming book the examples are tortured and boring so that it's hard to keep reading. Not so here.
Everything is well motivated and the writing style is amusing throughout. If you are coming from a system language background you will be hooked immediately. The ease with which many tasks are dealt with in Perl is astonishing. The amusing style and excellent presentation is kept up in all chapters of the book. The book will give you an overview of the language and basic skills. None of the programming books I have seen comes close to explaining basic constructs as clearly as this one. If this is your first book of first language you are very lucky. You will feel the need for an in depth presentation. This is not a criticism of the book. What's presented here is already very powerful.
Even after 2 days I was able to write a script doing some useful work I could not otherwise have accomplished. Perl is too rich to give an exhaustive treatment in 260 pages. You'll need Larry Wall's book also and this is clearly stated in the book. This book makes learning Perl fun and will create a lot of fans for the language. It's the perfect entry and will keep you strongly motivated to delve deeper.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: From a grateful beginner...
Comment: A friend of mine, ever anxious that I become a Perl girl, bought me this book. After going through the first half of it, I am actually beginning to conclude that programming is relatively painless...Schwartz and Phoenix start slow. *Really* slow. I knew a very few Unix commands before opening this book, but that's it. No other programming languages, nothin'. Despite my lack of background, I found "Learning Perl" easy to read, the examples doable, thus keeping me from giving up. (Which, I assure you, I would've done had this been difficult.) So, my guess is that if you already have a smattering of programming, this book may progress too slowly for your taste. But for the absolute beginner, it's great.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Quite a useful beginning to Perl
Comment: My first experience with Perl was a book that I had bought at a used bookstore. It was terrible! After trudging through that book, I learned some basic Perl, and have been able to write CGI.However, one day I picked up this book and found there was quite a lot of stuff I had missed. I read it all the way through, did all the exercises, and voila! My Perl has significantly improved. Of all the O'Reilly books on Perl, this one is the best for a Perl beginner to start with. The two best aspects of this book are the careful, though light-hearted explanation of many perl concepts (some I thought I had known) and the assignments at the end of the chapters and the fact that this book prints the answers in the back (surprisingly few books do that). This book is definitely geared toward Unix, so if you don't use Unix, I would recommend the Win32/Perl book by O'Reilly. Also, there are a couple points where it is difficult to follow, namely chapter 1, and chapter 19. However, I have used this book as a textbook for my Perl class, and found it is the best by far. Most other books are either too easy, or too cursory. It really is the best beginner's Perl book I have found yet. Anyhow, in summary, despite some small setbacks, I would strongly recommend this book to beginners, or people who want to brush up on their Perl (especially if they learned it elsewhere). Definitely two thumbs up!
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