Customer Rating:  
Summary: Should not be your first book on Perl
Comment: The main advantage of the book is that it is short. The second edition is not much different from the first one and if you like to buy the book you can save some money buying the first edition -- it still can be found 50%-75% off). It's just an introduction to Perl 4 not to Perl 5, but as Perl 4 is a reasonable subset of Perl to master at the beginning level it's OK approach. The second edition is disappointing. It's kind of Randall L. Schwartz fiasko. The "Just Another Perl Hacker" as any hacker should be lazy, but probably not to such an extent: the only one new chapter (brief overview of CGI) and one new appendix (listing of standard Perl modules) were added (probably by Tom Christiansen, as the team now include him). The examples and exercises are identical to the the first edition. Go for Perl Complete instead, if this will be your first book. Skip this book if you already have at least one introductory book on Perl in this case better get Effective Perl Programming instead.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My well worn copy of Learning Perl
Comment: I bought Learning Perl when it was first published. It went around the office and everyone read it. I now go back to the highlighted, notated (by many different hands) pages once a while when I need a fresh idea for a solution in perl. This may be a "beginners book" to show the perl coder wannabe in a quick way all that can be done with perl, but I feel that the code examples are too sparse and don't comletely solve problems in programming perl as they arise. I also feel that it was not thorough enough in explaining the very basics of the language which to the uninitiated reader can seem like contradictions and lead to confusion. Everyone in the office wanted to write a real-world perl script once they finished the book. Even as a newbie perl coder I had to go to other resources to complete the simple script I was working on. But that can be said about most all programming languages... Use the examples for ideas, go back to it for explanations of syntax, but hold out for better books if you want complete results in perl scripts.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book to start learning PERL.
Comment: This was the first book I purchased on PERL, and it gave me a rapid introduction to a great programming language. I thought that the examples were usefull, and that the book was clear and covered the basics. However, I would stress that by itself, this book is almost useless, as it fails to cover many features that you need to write a programme that is usefull in the real world. I quickly moved onto the Programming Perl book from O'Reily which complements this book perfectly, and also the Advanced Perl book. This book really works best as part of the set of PERL books from O'Reily, and I therefore recommend that you get this book realising that if you find perl to be usefull, you are going to need the others.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Decent book for an undergrad class.
Comment: The book, like most O'Reilly books, is clear and useful. It is only an intro though, so don't think it will get you trough if you need to do something non-trivial in perl. The main reason I'm writing the review is to counter what another review said about Perl itself: that it is pointless and you can just use shell scripts insted and save time. Unless your just writing a simple 20 or 30 line program you don't want to be writing shell scripts. They are very slow, can have hard to debug run time errors, and have a messy and often cryptic syntax. Perl is fast and compiled and does lots of stuff replacing Bash and many Unix utilities.
Customer Rating:
Summary: very good for beginners
Comment: very good for beginners but does not have everything you are needed to know. Programing Perl is a better reference book.
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