Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent introduction to Perl!
Comment: This book covers the 10% of Perl that you use 90% of the time. Very few technical errors (all programming books have some). With this book, you can easily learn the basics of Perl in 2 or 3 days. Once suggestion though- if you are new to Perl, skip the chapter "Quick Stroll through Perl", it really discouraged me from reading the book. But once I skipped that chapter, everything was well written starting with the most basic of concepts. Once done with the other chapters, go back and read the "stroll through Perl" and it should be very clear to you then.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good into to Perl but insufficient for real work
Comment: Easy to read. Good introduction to language. Don't expect to be able to write significant programs with only this book. You'll need a much more complete reference.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Tutorial
Comment: Herbert Schildt is my C,C++ and Java Man. I rely on James Jaworski and Danny Goodman for JavaScript. Elizabeth Castro for HTML 4. If your're like me and and want clear authorative authors good at teaching programming instead of trying to tickle your funny bone , add Randal L. Schwartz and Learning Perl to your shopping cart. In only a couple of weeks I was able to go from zero Perl know-how to being able to create a full blown CGI script with this book. Visit http://www.chapter49.com and click on the Trucking Jobs Across America links to see the results.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Poorly organized and difficult to use
Comment: As an experienced systems administrator and script writer I was extremely offput by this book. Of course it's an ORA book and thus the quality is there, but I swear I have no idea how the authors got this poorly organized, confusing amalgamation past the editors unless they were simply too baffled to reject it and gave up. For starters, the footnotes often contradict the text which references them. The writing is thick and assumes too much. The authors' sense of humor apparently dictates the presense of smart-alecky and totally irrelevant commentary at random spots, just to make sure that the reader is absolutely lost. And the index! The index references such important aspects of Perl as "Astro [from "the Jetsons"], pronouncing 'Windex'" and "Max Headroom," yet if you look up the keyword "hash" -- which has an entire chapter devoted to it -- there is no listing at all in the entire index. You can look up associative arrays (a deprecated term) though. I found this book to be hostile to the learning process. In fact, I picked it up no fewer than three times trying to learn basic perl from it, only to toss it down in frustration after pulling my hair out. Compare the ORA Korn shell book, which is beautifully instructive, concise and clear, and with a wonderful index with nearly every important function listed. This was the first ORA book I wished I hadn't bothered to purchase. One could argue that perl5 is simply too complex to be gently introduced, yet I learned more about perl from reading Webmonkey's quickie six page tutorial than I did from "Learning Perl." I was quite disappointed with this book. Buy a copy if you must, but plan to use it as a (poor) reference because its teaching abilities are limited.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Book, but somewhat hard to grasp.
Comment: This is a really good book, of course, i dont except anything less because it's a O'reilly book! The only that is difficult is learning it at first. If you dont already know the basic syntax then it is really tough to understand. Once you get the hang of it, you can't put it down!!!
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