Rating: 
Summary: Great book to get started -- that's right "Learning Perl"
Review: I have been trying to learn Perl for months but never gained confidence or had enough enthusiasm to learn dry coding.This book did the magic. The Chapters are small and simple and easy to understand. Of course once you get started you'll need a reference book like "programming Perl". Thank you and God Bless you all
Rating: 
Summary: A Very Good Introduction to Perl
Review: This is a very good introduction to Perl. Randal and Tom have done a good job. But it is too simple that developers have to go for other books like "Programming Perl" or "Perl Cookbook" for reference when they are working on real projects!! Great!! If you are new to Perl, you should get one!
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book. Good for beginners.
Review: I like the book a lot. I am reading it right now. The thing about the book is it's program codes. I usually figure out how to program by viewing code and using man pages to figure out what the function does. So books with words don't help out that much and books with examples do. If you are someone who can look at something and find the meaning then this is a great book. It's a also a good book for people who will read but that takes longer :-) My only problem is that I wished the book would go a little more in depth to at least intermediate level and call that beginner level and use more examples (code).
Rating:
Summary: Should not be your first book on Perl
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great book to start learning PERL.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Decent book for an undergrad class.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: very good for beginners
Review: very good for beginners but does not have everything you are needed to know. Programing Perl is a better reference book.
Rating:
Summary: Useful, but unclear in several parts.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Good for learning the language
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for Beginners
Review: 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.
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