Rating: 
Summary: Simple put - the best Perl book just got better!
Review: This book is more comprehensive and even better than the 2nd edition. Why bother wasting time say more, this is the best Perl book yet! :)PS: Wish other computer books are written as well as this one.
Rating: 
Summary: useless; will not teach you Perl
Review: This book is a reference, nothing less and nothing more. If you already know Perl and want a reference, you might as well get this one. It has a geeky mystique too it and a certain crowd will look up to you for owning it. But that's all it's good for. As a reference, it throws piles and piles of Perl special identifiers, syntax operators, and other stuff in your face without a single decent example. Even a master programmer will not learn Perl from such a presentation, any more than you can learn English from reading a dictionary. To actually learn the language, for those of us who buy books because we hope to learn something, try Learning Perl by the same publisher.
Rating:
Summary: If you buy one Perl book, make it this
Review: Perl has affectionately been described as the swiss-army chainsaw of languages. While Java gets all the press, it is Perl which is quietly working in many back-offices, doing all sorts of menial tasks which take too long in other languages. I depend upon Perl to write small one-off programs that access and transform data. I also used it to migrate data for 1,800 employees from unstructured Excel spreadsheets to a relational database. It took me far less time and was essentially free when compared to other data migration approaches. This book is the definitive work on Perl. The authors' love of Perl comes through. What also comes through is that the authors genuinely love their audience. While you will find that they are endowed with laziness, impatience and hubris, you will soon discover that there can be an immensely positive slant to these "vices". Their sense of humor lends fun to what could become a dry subject in others' hands. Learn Perl from the people that invented the language, that work and train others in the language everyday. Buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Camel is getting bigger and international
Review: With almost 500 pages more than the previous edition, the new Camel is packed with new info covering Perl 5.6 as well as expanded content on topic discussed in 2nd Edition. I personally interested in the Unicode area most since one of my upcoming project is to internationalize the company existing web site. A Must-Have for Perl Programmer of any level.
Rating: 
Summary: Okay book, but there's a better one!
Review: This book contains lots of reference material but very little discussion of "programming perl." The type of information in this book is the same information you would look-up at (but using the web site is better because it is more up to date, and has a search engine). I would recommend "Learning Perl" instead (also from O'Reilly). "Learning Perl" has lots of discussion of how Perl works, and is interesting to read. Combined with the reference from perl.com, this is the best way to learn Perl.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: This book is a masterpiece which changed my life and the lives of many, many people. Who knows how many organizations depend on Perl. May God bless the authors.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: This book is a masterpiece which changed my life and the lives of many, many people. Who knows how many orginizations depend on Perl. May God bless the authors.
Rating: 
Summary: Professional reference
Review: Perl is an extremely powerful tool for both the begining web editor and for the webmaster. This book functions as a great reference but is not meant as a beginner guide to perl or cgi. It is an awesome reference though.
Rating:
Summary: A "don't have to" read
Review: The official reference for the Perl language did not improve in its second generation. The original "purple Camel" is, in my opinion, a true classic where books about programming and programming languages are concerned--I rank it right there with The C Programming Language, Anatomy of Lisp, Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, and so forth. It was a classic because it was filled with lucid expressions of the thoughts of Perl's quintessentially pragmatic creator, Larry Wall. It was a classic because it provided a literate and thoroughly reasoned counterpoint to arguments in favor of more formally based languages and programming styles. But ... somewhere in the extensive revisions, additions, extensions, and deletions that transformed the first Camel book into this, the second Camel book, the magic went away. And some very suspicious stuff went in. The book lost its digressive, essayic feel and became more of a perfunctory reference work. Additionally, some of the completely new material turned out to be just a little ... strange. The discussion of object-oriented programming based around the term "thingy" just doesn't do it for me. (Ignore all that and read Damian Conway's book instead.) Preferences of style and tone aside, an unavoidable flaw of an infrequently-updated book like this one is that it inevitably refers to an obsolescent version of Perl. If you want current Perl documentation, you need to read the man(ual) pages that came with that version of Perl. What's in this book is generally but not completely accurate for newer versions of Perl. And because it's intended to be a more or less complete reference covering even small details, it can't help but be dead wrong on some points as the language continues to evolve. Bear in mind, also, that much of the material in this book comes STRAIGHT from the man pages. (Just not the up-to-date versions.) A third edition is in the works, which will no doubt be at least a temporary improvement. If the newer version restores the insight and charm of the original, it will certainly deserve a place on your programming bookshelf. But as a reference work intended to cover a constantly-evolving language, Programming Perl will always suffer by being out of date. If you are the type who dislikes reading electronic documentation, by all means, buy a copy of this book. But you'll find that you have to use the online documentation anyway.
Rating:
Summary: The complete reference.
Review: I agree heartily with the previous review. If you want to learn to program in Perl, this book is not for you. The book is a overview of the perl language. Most of the book is a reference of perl functions. So if you want to know absolutely every perl function this is for you. If you are interested in practical usage, examples, etc, this book is not for you.
| 
