6 months ago I opened this book, and today I'm working through "The Perl Cookbook",(which I highly recommend as well) in between I've written thousands of lines of Perl code.

I make a point of promoting this book to any friends who mention the need for a scalable scripting language (if they don't already own it). If you're new to Perl, buy this book. If you're new to CGI script development, buy this book. You'll be glad you did!

1. This book seems like THE place to get enough of a sense of Perl to decide whether it is worth learning.

2. In particular the first chapter - a broad walkthrough of the language - gives a great overview without unneccessary detail, and is itself worth the price of admission. You can read it in a couple of hours, and by the time you're finished, you'll know whether Perl is the right tool for whatever job you have in mind.

3. Much of the power of Perl lies in its use of Regular Expressions. One weakness of this book is the cursory treatment (chapter 7) of this topic. If you know you want to learn to work with Perl, buy a copy of Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions (also in the O'Reilly series) right away.

4. The book is not particularly practical as a reference. If you are going be doing any serious programming in Perl, get yourself a reference manual. Again I like the O'Reilly offerings; your tastes may vary.

5. Nor is it particularly heavy on the theory side. Again, another text may be useful here.

6. Despite those limitations (or perhaps because of them) the book makes an excellent starting place for one looking to learn Perl. It's a fast, well-written, pleasurable read, and one familiar with other procedural languages (C,Pascal,Basic,Fortran, etc.) should be able to get through it in as little as a weekend.

7. Oh, and one more thing. If you need to do a fair bit of string processing, data extraction, etc., Perl is indeed worth a look. It may not be elegant, but Perl sure is useful. And in my opinion, it's fun as well.

For all but the most experienced programmers, I would suggest this book -- in conjunction with -- the Camel. I found the prose easy to read and follow, and the examples illuminating, yet sparse. I would have doubled the number of examples and also questions at the end of each chapter.

My method of success was to read the book through, re-reading occasionally for difficult sections. Read the chapters and do the examples. And finally, read the Camel book and when hitting a difficult topic or one covered very thinly in that book, to go back and read the relevant chapter in the Llama.

Overall, an excellent book. Well written, good examples, and for the novice to mid-level programmer from other languages.

Now, listen up.

-I only know the basics of C++ programming;

-I do not know anything about UNIX OS;

-I create websites using HTML and JavaScripts;

-This book help me understand enough about Perl to write my own CGI scripts and run them on the Internet!!! (I've got 3 forums running now and several voting sections!)

If you are a pure Windows user, like myself, but would like to learn the basics of Perl, get this book, period!

Now the cons: As mentioned with so many reviews, this book is very brief. Although I was stuck in chapter for 1 week (!!!), I "fly" through the rest of the chapters in 2-3 days! The biggest problem I find is the lack of adequate explanation for each operators, regular expressions, etc. When writing my own CGI, I have to continuously look for alternative sources of Perl references to clear up my queries and help me to understand a few particular properties of Perl.

For example, I have to use the s///; and the tr///; many times in my scripts, but without extensive understanding of all their properties, I find it "crippling" to my work.

Enough said. For an introduction to Perl, I would give this book 5 stars. If you hunger for much more information, like myself, get this book first, before trying out the lastest Programming Perl (3rd Edition).