Customer Rating:  
Summary: Useful, but unclear in several parts.
Comment: I'm reading this book right now. It has value as an introduction, but I doubt that this book would make any sense if I had no programming experience. However, it's not an introduction to programming; it's an introduction to Perl, and that it does well. I only wish that the authors wrote more simply and clearly. Often it is hard to figure out what they mean. For instance, read this excerpt on p. 83 (2nd Edition):"A word boundary is the place between characters that match \w and \W, or between characters matching \w and the beginning or ending of the string. Note that this has little to do with English words and a lot more to do with C symbols, but that's as close as we get." The first time I read this, I had to back up and read it several more times just to figure out what the author means here. Is a space a word boundary? Apparently not, but I had trouble figuring this out from the text. Intuitively, I'd think that a space would be a word boundary, but nowhere do they say that it isn't. Things like this make it a bit tougher to read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for learning the language
Comment: Learning Perl worked very well to teach me the language. I don't have a very deep programming background, but this book doesn't require one. The one area where I felt the text fell down was on CGI programming. A lot of people, myself included, are interested in Perl solely for CGI scripting, so I could have used a bit more than the provided text. Overall though, this book does a great job of explaining the fundamentals of this odd little language.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for Beginners
Comment: As a self taught beginner programmer, I discovered perl to be the easiest language to learn. Unfornately, this book is not really for beginners. Although, the examples seem to start out easy, assumptions are made at your cost as you become slightly confused and come to a dead stop in understanding. This book is great for someone who already knows a programming language for it gets them on track quickly. I've already found a better book for beginner's that contrast this one a lot more than I expected.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good but could be better
Comment: I come from a Pascal background and I found this book useful with the control structures and etc. When it came to the CGI chapter the book was a disaster. The HTML output from the CGI.pm which they discuss is jumbled up and I would prefer that in future version they cover both CGI.pm and CGI-lib.pl .Cover in more detail the CGI stuff. This is a good book if you already know one programming language. Beginners beware!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book, but just one caveat
Comment: So far, the book seems pretty good. It gently introduces the reader to the language. I do not have a programming background, so take that into consideration as you read this review.The caveat: A reader who can only FTP to his/her server probably will have difficulty with the exercises since many of the exercises assume the reader has the capability to telnet/access the UNIX shell. You may want to check with your ISP to make sure you can telnet to the UNIX server. Some readers may welcome the challenge of modifying the exercises to work with HTML/browser input.
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