From a self-teaching perspective, I found this book to be exactly what I needed. I'll admit that the first chapter (a general description of the Perl language) was not very helpful, but I found the division of the rest of the book by small pieces of the syntax (scalars, arrays, hashes, regular functions, i/o, etc.) to suit my needs, which tended to be along the lines of: I need to do x right now. I learned the easy stuff really quickly, and I still use the book as a constant reference.

Now, it is just a beginner's text, so it is not an ideal complete reference, and you won't learn anything particularly nifty. However, if you need to both learn how to program and actually do some programming at the same time (i.e. not in a class-room setting), Learning Perl can be a wonderful text.

I myself think Perl is great, but I have some serious problems with the way this book was written and edited. The authors can't seem to decide whether this should be an easy book for programmers, a difficult book for non-programmers, or even (at times) an easy book for non-programmers. That is to say, the tone, style, and assumptions about the audience change throughout, sometimes from page to page. Key concepts are glossed over with a minimum of explanation (the chapter on hashes, particularly, is a disgrace); then, defying all reason, very simple concepts are overexplained for two or three pages. The authors have been too close to their subject for too long, and they seem to have forgotten what they learned and the order in which they learned it. Maybe a newbie co-author might have helped.

If you are an experienced developer or are comfortable with UNIX, you'll get a lot of benefit from "llama." Otherwise, though, start with another book, or learn something about UNIX first. Then return to this book, and you should have an easier time of it.

The first chapter, A stroll Through Perl, is perhaps the biggest flaw in the book. Rather than introducing the capabilities of Perl (which I think is what the author's intended), it bogs the new reader down in detail and seems to set forth an avalanche of cryptic code at you. It was so bad that, thinking that Chapter 1 was an indication of the rest of the book (ie it was all too cryptic and meant for seasoned programmers), I set the book aside for a few months.

I came back to the book when a friend of mine picked it up, and, after skimming over Chapter 1, was pleasantly suprised. The rest of the book is easy to read and understand, though at times a little dense for the new programmer, and immediately useful. The examples are good illustrations of implementation ideas for concepts described in a chapter, and the excercises at the end of each chapter are good indications of what you've learnt. The book introduces new concepts smoothly and quickly integrates them into existing material, and culminates in an especially interesting and useful chapter on CGI (which is really what I wanted to use Perl for).

Overall, it's a great book, even for people who are new to programming: with a little dedication you'll be able to blaze through the chapters and become proficient at Perl basics. Some organisational errors let it down and make the introductory pages unjustifiably daunting for those new to programming, but other than that, it was a very satisfying and self-contained tutorial for Perl users.

So even if this book has a few Unix-specific features, the amount of documentation availible will fill in the gaps for your OS.