Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not really for absolute beginners
Comment: This book calls itself "Learning Perl," apparently because it is geared towards beginners. However, upon reading more and more of this book, it becomes increasingly clear that this book is not at all a learning tool, as it is a good reference for those who already learned the basics of Perl. The first chapter should be skipped over entirely if you're a beginner, because it will do nothing more than confuse you and turn you off to Perl. The subsequent chapters covers all relevant topics, but they skimp on providing descriptive key examples which would help you to better understand the concept. This book makes too many references to C and other languages, implying that you already know previous programming languages. The chapter on regular expressions is shamefully cursory and lacking in examples which can be adequately picked up by the Perl novice. The language of the text is not for the beginner user, as it throws around too many Perl-centric terms and definitions. For an intermediate, this may be sufficient, but it will not do for the beginner. I recommend Perl for Dummies as the ultimate beginner's tool. That book doesn't cover as many topics as this book, but it certainly explains conceps in a much more novice-friendly language than Learning Perl. Learning Perl makes the mistake of not keeping it simple. This is a very important teaching idea, when your expected audience are complete novices who need to have everything explained to them in basic layman's terms. This book is more of a sophisticated primer for already skilled programmers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Poor choice for a beginner
Comment: If you want to learn Perl I'd suugest Cozzens Beniing Perl from WROX Press. The Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days or 24 hours are fair, but much better than this book.This book presents things in a disorganized and incomplete way. Important concepts aren't emphasized, and syntax is presented without going into detail, its easy to miss.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Awful
Comment: I see a disturbing ternd by O'Reily of pumping out books that are not well done. I consider this a terrible book. Its poorly organized, skips over many important topics, and among the worst books on Perl Ive seen. My gut impression was it took them about a month to write it, just a rush job rip off of programming Perl.A beginner should avoid this book. Learn Perl from another book and use Programming Perl as a reference. The Cookbook is good too. Avoid this book, its a waste of money. Its the worst languages book Ive seen in a while.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Only for absolute starters in programming
Comment: Don't know about beginners, but for the experienced programmer who wants to learn perl, this book is a waste of time and money. It teaches far too little on too many pages. You'll read it once (diagonally as we say in german) and then never again. Get the reference and the Perl Cookbook instead and you'll be far better off.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Keep looking
Comment: I don't understand why people rave about this book. Whenever I try to use it as a reference, I end up even more confused then when I started out. I find that I can usually guess the answer to a problem or else just "do it like they do it in C" rather than trying to find a good example to follow in this book. For example, after reading the section on doing formatted printing statements using "fprintf" I was thoroughly confused. I tried using the function just like C does and it worked, but I would have spent days trying to figure out the syntax from this book's explaination. I don't know of a better book, but I would suggest you keep looking for something else.
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