Customer Rating: 
Summary: Clear, and comprehensible
Comment: I found it very suitable for beginners provided that you have some background in Unix, C, sed, awk and shell programming languages but even if you don't, it is still pretty easy to grasp if you put enough effort into it i.e. at least type in the examples on a Unix terminal and try to understand what's going on. By the way, if you don't know anything about Unix, I suggest trying Harley Han's "Student Guide to UNIX", a very good book with introduction to Unix commands and editors.The author did a great job of providing examples along with every new concepts he was trying to explain. I have to admit that the first chapter looks kinda scary for somebody without any background in computer programming but if you can figure out the 'big picture' and spend enough time trying to follow the logic, the following chapters until almost the last chapter are easy. All the exercises on the back of the chapters are of reasonable difficulty, enough to try your understanding of the material presented in the chapter. If you can do the exercises by yourself, you can be sure that you already grasp the material. The best part is, all the answers are available in the appendix to let you see how the author implemented it (since they are Perl experts, I always ended up writing solutions that were longer than necessary compared to theirs). However, to reap the maximum benefit, it's recommended that you also have "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall besides you as this book makes a lot of references to "Programming Perl" reference book. Buy this book, and learn how to code in Perl, an investment that you'll not regret.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Beginners Guide to Perl
Comment: If you are new to Perl this is the book for you. The syntax and usage examples were great and timely! You actually get to apply what the authors are trying to convey with the exercises at the end of each chapter. The authors are also nice enough to throw in some basic cgi programming material. However, this book is designed just for what it says "Learning". This is by no means a reference book for Perl nor is it a place to learn basic Unix commands. It will be a while before I auction this one off.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An Outstanding Beginner's Guide to Perl
Comment: I manage a crew of 20 people who do intrusion detection analysis. I read Randal Schwartz's excellent book about a year ago and have since used it to write a number of useful Perl scripts. Some examples: I modified the script we use to parse connection information from Cisco's NetRanger to show context information as well, created a script to strip out protected networks from log files, wrote a script to strip out warning values and other unneeded fields from connection log data. While Learning Perl didn't provide me with all the information I needed to write everything I wanted to, it did give me the necessary background for ways to construct useful tools with Perl. It continues to serve as a useful reference tool.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for beginners of PERL with C/C++ experience.
Comment: This book is awesome. It explains the concepts at the perfect pace for the intermediate programmer. I have only read this book for 1 day so far, but the first 'intro' chapter has already walked me through concepts such as Hash tables, arrays, and all the loops and many string functions. This book is excellent and makes PERL easy to learn if you have already done C or C++. If you are an absolute beginner (never programmed before), this will not be easy to follow. I suggest learning C or C++ first, as it is the building block of many languages and has similar commands.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you want to learn perl this is where to start
Comment: As a hobby web developer and Linux user, I have looked at and installed many programs written in perl. I never really thought about learning perl because their are so many free resources on the 'Net and it just seemed complicated. The only problem is that you can never seem to find the exact program with the exact function you desire. I have paid programmers to make programs for me and purchased pre-written programs for my web sites, but I still always wish for one more function.I bought this book only in hopes that I would be able to hack existing programs to fine tune them more to my needs not to write my own. Guess what... It's not as hard as I thought. This book starts you off building a fun little script in the first chapter and by the end of the second you are writing three of your own. Each chapter brings you painlessly closer to understanding the basic principals of perl. By the end of the book I was able to write some simple, but very functional scripts on my own. While this book does NOT claim to teach you to be a programmer and only covers the basics, it sure teaches you to think and read in perl. If you are thinking about it yourself don't look any further.
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