Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable Read
Comment: The first thing that stood out to me about the book was the humor of the authors. The footnotes were not only informative but also good ways to lighten the mood of the book.
However, the jokes do not take away from the content in any way - you will learn a lot from the llama book. I always recommend the llama to anyone who asks for a book to learn Perl.
Now, this isn't an introduction to programming, programming basics are assumed (which isn't much to ask). But that's another thing I liked about "Learning Perl" - the authors give you the information you need with no fluff. Everything is straight to the point and explained clearly & concisely.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Perfect introduction to Perl scripting
Comment: I learnt Perl scripting from the third edition of The Llama, and recently had cause to brush up my Perl for a new job, so I thought I'd check out the fourth edition. I'm pleased to say it's still an excellent work. If you want to use Perl as a scripting language, this may be all you need for your entire scripting career. Some basic programming knowledge might be helpful, but even a complete beginner could get something out of this.
The basics are covered well: strings, numbers, control structures, subroutines, arrays and hashes, and most importantly, reading and writing files, and the mighty regular expressions. In fact, I've not read a better treatment of regular expressions anywhere else. Everything is clearly explained and well-written. Basically, this is the gold standard against which all introductory books to a programming language should be judged.
However, this book makes no claim to covering all of Perl. At least the main text of the book doesn't. I don't know what happened with the blurb on the back of the book, but it mentions, among other things: threading, references, objects, modules and package implementation. Technically, these topics are indeed present, but only in that a paragraph each is devoted to them in Appendix B. You will certainly learn nothing of any value about them.
There are some other minor quibbles: you may find the constant Flintstones references tiring after a while. Also potentially wearing are the sometimes inane footnotes, which breaks the flow of the reading experience for little reward. On the other hand, I found them a lot less annoying in this edition, so perhaps I've just mellowed out in the intervening years. Finally, the last chapter does a very whistlestop tour of map, grep, exception handling with eval, and array and hash slicing. I've never found the 'cram a bunch of stuff we don't have time to talk about into one chapter' approach to be very useful, and it doesn't work here, either. Fortunately, apart from the slices, it's all covered again at slightly greater length in Intermediate Perl.
Speaking of Intermediate Perl, if you want to learn Perl as a general purpose language, rather than for short scripts, you need to go and read that one next. Many suggest that you can graduate onto The Camel straight after The Llama, but I strongly disagree -- I tried and failed miserably.
But as long as you bear in mind you're only getting half the Perl experience, this is still the book I would thrust into the hands of anyone looking to learn Perl.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Learning? This book is confusing on purpose!
Comment: It's amazing how this book could become so popular.
The set of examples is very confusing.
The authors seem to be trying to break the world record of code "compactness" or something.
I understand the language is very powerful and allows to write compact code, but this is definetly not the right thing to do while learning a new language, at least not if you do it at the expense of clarity.
In my opinion, a good programming introductory book (as this one intends to be, from the name) should teach one concept at a time, and give very clear examples.
I don't recommend this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: How to write unmaintainable code
Comment: I've been programming for a long time, C/C++, some Java, PHP, shell scripts, awk, etc. I needed a way to learn perl fast for a project, and a colleague recommended this book.
There's a lot of unreadable unmaintainable perl code out there, and books like this a probably a primary contributor to that. The authors seem to go out of their way to avoid writing clear code, constantly saying things like "well, you could write it this way, but perl programmers consider that a waste of typing," instead preferring to depend on hidden variables and the wide range of default behaviors that are perl.
The book is organized in a peculiar way that made it hard to find things: I don't usually expect to find descriptions of control constructs such as loops only in chapters about arrays.
I've come to see that its quite possible to write clear maintainable perl, but this book encourages poor coding habits.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Keep it handy!
Comment: I have owned this book for a couple of years now and I keep it on a bookshelf an arms reach away. It spends most of the time on my desk anyways. The book is excellent for beginners - I knew nothing of Perl when I bought it. I used it as a textbook and spent about a week reading through the chapters and doing the excercises. I've used it as a reference ever since. It really only covers basic Perl topic - there is a brief mention of databases at the end and two mentions of references in the whole book, but as a tutorial I certainly recommend it.
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