Rating: 
Summary: Great book!
Review: This book is a great read to get you started in the fun world of perl programming. The authors make the book quite enjoyable to read and I found myself on many occasions not wanting to put the book down.I am quite looking forward to start reading Programming Perl, also by O'reilly.
Rating:
Summary: Before you dive into the details, get the basics here
Review: This book is a great book for beginners who wish to learn Perl. Some books are written specifically for CGI/Web programming and teach just enough Perl to get you going . . . but there is much more to the Perl language than just making CGI programs. This book gets you started with the basics without getting you bogged down with the details. CGI is covered, a little bit. Once you've mastered the material in this book, you can move onto the Camel Book (by Wall). This book is very readable and gets you started writing code right away.
Rating:
Summary: a must have for beginner
Review: I look for a beginning perl book that teaches me Perl in a programmer to programmer tone, assuming I already have basic programming skills. After many books, finally, I got learning perl which helps me learn as well as appreciate Perl as a programming language.
I always think that perl is only useful as a CGI scripting language. But it actually is a very good language to work with UNIX and to do text formatting. This book presents different topics of Perl, including Regular Expressions, Filehandles, Formats, Directory Access, Database Access, CGI. I particularly love the regular expression chapter, it's concise and simple. though you may find there are not enough details on some topics e.g. CGI, please remember this book is only 302 pages for beginners. If you want more specific details on a particular topics. you should go to another book. The examples in the book are not just naive and useless in the real programming world, but they are really useful and handy for you to cut and paste to your perl projects.
One of the best features of the book is the exercises after each chapter. Those questions are really testing what you have learn in each chapters. From the questions, you will know whether you already master the chapter or not. the answers provided are not just answers, the authors explain the them too!
As a beginner's book, "Learning Perl" does a good job to teach readers to write useful perl programs and scripts.
Rating: 
Summary: good for both beginners and experienced programmers
Review: This book gave me a very good introduction to Perl. The book was, for the most part, very easy to read and understand. Skip chapter 1 if you aren't already a pretty decent hacker. It will simply confuse you. I also wish they had yanked the chapters on databases out and beefed up the CGI section instead. Maybe even add something on Perl Sockets.
Rating:
Summary: Great Stuff for an intro
Review: Coming from a computer science background, and knowing how notorious computer programmers are for "documentation" I was expecting to negotiate thru this book to learn the language. However, the book is pretty simple and easy to use, and no computer science background is really necessary, except exposure to Unix, which is probably the environment you're working in anyway, but the tips and tricks are mostly platform-independent(i.e. should work just as well in Win95/WinNT) and the new chapter on cgi programming is a very useful for basic web development. Great buy!
Rating:
Summary: A magnificently concise introduction to a powerful language
Review: Publishers should take note that despite the relative brevity of this book, it remains one of the best selling programming books year after year. And, more importantly, it accomplishes its goal of teaching the language without being repetitive or condescending (or inaccurate) like so many other programming books. This should be your learning guide for Perl, <I>Programming Perl</I> (the infamous 'Camel' book) should be your reference, and <I>Mastering Regular Expressions</I> should be how you dive off the deep end!
Rating:
Summary: the "official" perl book
Review: This book, along with "Perl Cookbook" are considered the official resources for Perl information. Although this book is not the best choice for the first time programmer. It does explain things somewhat clearly, they are written from a somewhat technical perspective. And any type of crossover information is not explain so you MUST read each chapter clearly before going to the next one. But if you already know some programming then this book will make sense. I;m not bashing the book, as you can see I gave it 4 stars, I'm just presenting the way the book is.
Rating:
Summary: Opening the world of Perl
Review: When I first picked up a copy of Learning Perl, I was interested in programming but had no experience. If you're not discouraged by the first chapter, a stroll through Perl just to give you a taste of Perl's power, Learning Perl is the most effective way to teach yourself this outstanding no-limits language. And, once you finish the book, take a look at Appendix B and learn about more of Perl's capabilities explained in other books, namely Programming Perl
Rating:
Summary: Excellent place to start
Review: If you want to know how to write code in Perl, start with this book. It is helpful to know a programming language but it is not required. The author takes you on a step by step walk through the perl language. The chapters are short and easy to read. Each chapter introduces a new concept. Each chapter also provides you with some exercises so you can practice your newly aquired perl knowledge. If you are new to the perl language, this book will help you learn the language quickly and efficiently.
Rating:
Summary: A retrospective from a Unix user and casual programmer
Review: I've been a Unix user for seven+ years, and have some programming experience, although I am by no means really knowledgable about either. When I entered my most recent job, I needed to learn Perl fast, and so I used this book to help me get started. 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.
| 
