Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not for experienced computer scientists or programmers
Comment: I highly recommend learning Perl to anyone working in computer science, but I can't in good faith recommend Learning Perl to anyone who considers him or herself an experienced programmer. The book proceeds very slowly and is pretty short, meaning that in the end you'll know only the very basics of Perl. In fact, many of the footnotes refer the reader to Programming Perl or to the perl manpages to get the "real story" on some issue that Learning Perl glosses over.If you intend to learn Perl (and more than the very basics), you will probably end up reading through Programming Perl or many of the Perl manpages. I would consider Learning Perl only as an optional primer for those not already fluent in one or more languages like C. Otherwise you will spend some time reviewing the semantics of while loops, what a file handle is, etc. You will have learned the basics of pattern matching and Perl's syntax and idioms, but you may as well cut to the chase and learn from Programming Perl. On the other hand, I am coming from a theoretical computer science background (the CS program at Carnegie Mellon University); Learning Perl may very well be appropriate for have never used anything more sophisticated than a scripting language. However, even beginning programmers should be aware that Learning Perl assumes familiarity with a Unix environment. (But see also: Learning Perl on Win32 Systems). If you have doubts, at least take a look at the perl manpages. They come free with every distribution of perl.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners
Comment: I picked up this book the same time I started a beginning Unix class. I'm mainly a windows person, but want to broaden my skills into the Unix world, also the class was going so slow, I figured I could teach myself perl in my spare time. Wrong.I have had programming classes before, in Basic, Fortran, Pascal, and Cobol. With this book, by page 13 he was covering arrays, hashes, and other terms I just didn't quite get. I can follow the examples in the book, but I'm wondering why the syntax is so funky. I put the book down, and picked it up again after finishing my Unix class. The terms make much more sense now after being exposed to regular expressions, grep, sed, awk, etc. I'm going to give it a second try, but I dont' think I'm really going to learn this well outside of a classroom.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Comment: It's the ideal introduction if you have some basic knowledge in C and Unix. No boring introduction, it jumps right into the world of Perl. If some of the reviews here are complaining about Chapter 1--I think it's great and the "Stroll Through Perl" is very well and detailed explained in the following chapters. If you have no idea what Perl is about but know enough about Unix and programming that a "loop" is nothing weird for you--get this book!
Customer Rating:
Summary: For someone who knows how to program, but doesn't know perl.
Comment: If you already know how to program and don't want to wade through chapters of 'this is a variable' 'this is a string' this book is for you. Everything you need to know to write useful perl programs is covered.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Like the Camel Book, only smaller!
Comment: This gripping tale of a man who cannot find a reasonable set of instructions to get started with programming Perl. In desperation, he tries the Camel book: alas! The text assumes too much, he understands the concepts, but cannot put them together to create something meaningful.Then, behold! The Lama book! He sits down for a pleasant evening, hoping to discover that the Lama book will unfold the mysteries of programming to him, and take his fluffy English-major brain and force some structure on it: make him learn to think logically and linerally.No. The Lama book does not do it either. He drops the book to the floor, with tears welling in his eyes. Will he never be satisfied? Will he ever find the Perfect Beginners Text?He thinks that he'll just skip Perl and do Python instead.
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