Customer Rating:  
Summary: Poor organization and inconsistent tone
Comment: I'm surprised to see so many positive reviews for _Learning Perl_. As another reviewer said, I think these comments represent more enthusiasm for the language than for the book. Randal Schwartz has a great reputation in the open-source community, and I have no experience with him as a trainer or consultant, but judging from this book I wouldn't hire him.The book has a serious problem in that the tone is totally inconsistent. Difficult concepts are explained in terms that assume in-depth knowledge of C, C++, and UNIX; and simple concepts are run into the ground in page after page of trivial examples. The authors also make the serious mistake, all too common in technical books, of providing jokey examples that obscure the main point---identifiers that form puns on statements, irrelevant jokes in comments, and so on. To some people this comes across as a light, friendly tone; to me it smacks of condescension and clannishness. I made the mistake of trying to use this book as a textbook for an introductory Perl class of students with a variety of levels of programming experience. The C-savvy students were bored, and the beginners felt they were being teased and condescended to. Summary: This book isn't up to O'Reilly's usual high standards. If you want to learn Perl, and you already have some programming experience, start with _Programming Perl_ and _Perl Cookbook_ (the Camel Books). If you have no programming experience, start with Simon Cozens' _Beginning Perl_.
Customer Rating:
Summary: perfect starting book
Comment: Any beginning through advanced programmer could pick this book up and be coding extremely practical Perl programs in minutes. It gives several good examples from basic "Hello World" stuff to CGI programs.. Includes the basics you need to know on regular expressions, system commands in a unix environment, and much more...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Aaaarrrgggghhhhh!
Comment: My main problem with this book is as follows: There are exercises at the end of each chapter that are oftentimes impossible to answer given the information presented to that point. For example, at the end of chapter 7, one exercise requires the use of an operator (&&) that is not even explained until chapter 9. I spent an entire day beating my head against this problem, only to give up and find out that I shouldn't have even known the answer to begin with! How frustrating!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Easiest introduction to Perl
Comment: If you're already familiar with programming, this book is the fastest way to learn the essentials of Perl. It does not covers all features but if you need more specific things in Perl it probably means you should use another programming language. Perl is very efficient for string processing and matching regular expressions but certainly not for low-level programing with tight operational requirements. However, for writing scripts very fast to analyze files or performing simple operations, Perl is best !If you want more advanced Perl features go to the "Perl Cookbook" that contains dozens of tricks for almost every possible problem or "Mastering algorithms with Perl"...but first look at the many Perl sites before considering buying such a book because almost everything in on the web ! If you want to learn Perl whithin a couple of hours, buy this book !
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for the Beginning Programmer
Comment: I'm a beginning programmer and find this book to be aimed at those with programming experience. I am required to continue with this book as it is being used as a textbook for my class, but I'm sure there are better books out there for beginners.Features I don't like, for example, are: 1.) The first chapter is a book overview as to what will be covered within the book, but it's so intense that you have to use other books to understand what's happening unless you have previous programming experience; 2.) Explaining Perl terms with C language terms, which is only usefully if you know C; 3.) Examples suddenly adding or taking away parenthesis without an explanation as to why; 4.) Giving an example of a while statement with braces, but not explaining what's really happening within those braces and why. This may very well be an excellent book for the ordained programmer, but if your just starting out I'd do some more searching.
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