To be fair, I did learn many of the basics of Perl by reading the book (although I never did figure out what the intro by Larry Wall was all about, his magical beads, etc. I thought maybe Weird Al Yankovic had written it instead). After plowing threw most of the book -- and many tears later, I found I could actually write a few simple Perl programs. But getting them to work on a real webserver was another story.

That's when someone introduced me to another scripting language called PHP. Bingo! I learned more PHP, and how to use it on webservers, in one weekend of studying the on-line user manual than I did in two months with the Perl book. In short, forget Perl, unless you really like studying long, pedantic, cryptic and utterly obscure syntax to get a simple task done. If you do, however, you will enjoy this Schwartz and Christiansen book.

Completely rewritten, the latest edition of this introductory Perl book is based on their Stonehenge "Learning Perl" course and instructor notes they've refined and road-tested over the years. They've simplified and reorganized the text for easier comprehension, with each set of exercises short enough for a 45-60 minute class. Yes, this book and its companion, "Programming Perl" are popular textbooks for college Perl programming courses. Even the jokes are better (be sure to read the footnotes, where most of them are).

Perl is ideal for quick and dirty programming, to automate repeated tasks. About 90% of Perl scripts are short ones, from 2 to 128 lines of code. That's what this book is designed to do, get you up to speed fast on the basics and defaults, and start cranking out useful short programs. For longer programs you can always hire a consultant, or read the sequel, "Programming Perl" and do it yourself.

I'd normally include a summarized table of contents here, but you're going to buy the book anyway. One nice change I enjoyed was the old regular expression chapter has been expanded into three, which makes this essential Unix tool easy to learn. Highly recommended. From WebReference.com.

Learning Perl is a good book for beginners. But alot has changed since 1997 (when it was published). If you want to learn the "basics" of Perl and are just gonna play around with Perl, this is one of the books for you. If you need to learn Perl for use in a production environment, you should look at some of the newer O'Reilly books on Perl. This book is just too old and outdated for me to give it more than 3 stars

The sequence of events starts a bit slow, but picks up as experience grows. The exercises are exactly as they should be - they offer a good chance to get experience but don't feel as if they are coming out of the blue. They usually involve extending or changing the example programs given earlier in the chapter, and they are usually something that once you grasp the underlying concept will take very little time to implement.

The title is very appropriate. There is a lot to Perl that is not covered (at least in any depth) in this book. The much thicker Programming Perl book takes up that slack, but the existance of this book is inspiring - you can read this book to learn enough perl to use for most practical purposes - and then have a good foundation when jumping into the "big book" - I like that approach to learning programming languages and I like this book.