Rating: 
Summary: You have no choice but become an expert Perl Programmer.
Review: I had to learn Perl in a big hurry to keep my job. Now I am a
web expert with Perl being my favourite. This little, simple and easy to read book is still my favourite, and has been borrowed
by most of my friends. This book is undoubtedly a "winner".
Rating:
Summary: Learn the most widely used scripting langauge for the Web!
Review: Perl is the most widely used scripting langauge for the World Wide Web and Randal L. Schwartz is a wiz when it comes to providing clear consise explanations for this coolest of langauges. If you are serious about configuration management, or getting data from forms on the World Wide Web, you owe it to yourself to start Learning Perl with this great guru!
For sanity's sake though, skip chapter 1 until after you've read through chapter 7.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Lead-Off to Mastering Perl
Review: Perl is an absolutely marvellous language for helping system administrators in their task of
handling multi-vendor machines, and is an excellent aid to increasing their laziness by helping
replace cumbersome shell scripts with elegant programs.
This book by Randal Schwartz brings
the novice to Perl programming up to speed quite gently, and shows off the power of Perl in a
clear cut manner. As a precursor to the book "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall, the founder of
Perl, this book is very nice. It starts with the simple Hello World program, and guides
the user through the preliminary stages of Perl as it increases the capability of the program. Another nice point is the presence of exercises at the end of each
chapter, challenging one to work out the programs and the bugs - an essential ingredient to
learning any computer language. It also helps that Randal provides answers to these exercises.
I
recommend this book and its companion volume, Programming Perl, very highly.
Rating:
Summary: A must have reference for the beginning perl hacker
Review: Perl is an outstanding tool for programmers who have to get the job done fast and efficiently. This book is a must have for anyone doing programming in a UNIX environment. This is the language of choice
for CGI programming due to its unique pattern matching and text substitution capability.
Looking forward to the sequel!
Rating:
Summary: A great book for beginner's.
Review: This book is excellent for those just learning programming without previous experience and even for those who already know another language. It explains the little details very well and leaves you understanding all that you have read. Perl is a great programming language and this book is perfect for learning the basics.
Rating:
Summary: A great introduction
Review: This book is aimed at Perl novices and sys admins who need to get up to speed quickly. As with most O'Reilly books I found the authors know thier stuff and the book was well edited. The book contains enough info to allow you to script most sys admin tasks, and has the benefit of being short and therefore easy to carry, but once you get a taste of Perl's power you will no doubt want to get the "camel" (programming perl), which is more comprehensive.
Rating: 
Summary: an excellent approach to a technical subject
Review: when i picked up this book i didn't know any "real" programming languages - heck, i didn't even know how to write a shell script! in two months this book gave me the knowledge to create applications and report generators for my employer, quickly earning me a promotion.
it's real easy to gain practical knowledge from this introduction to perl due to the effective layout. some of the subjects aren't covered in very much detail, but the reader is always given sources for additional (free) information.
reading some of the silly commentaries posted here; if you cannot grasp what this book hands you, perhaps you should make the move to customer support or marketing and leave programming to the cognitive specimens.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Book - NOT FOR BEGINNERS!!!!!
Review: This is a great book but its NOT for someone who is completely new to perl and programming. This book assumes that you already have some experience programming with another language. I finished reading this book in two weeks. While reading I could feel for that person who is totally new to programming and is trying to understand some of the concepts that are explained. The book has few examples and does not walk you through from step 1 each time a new concept is introduced. It expects you to take all the knowlege from the previous chapter and carry it to the next and again to the next which I think would be pretty difficult for a person who has never programmed before to do. For example the simplest but most important $!/usr/bin/perl. The book only mentions this in the intro chapter and you never see it again for the remainder of the book. My suggestion would be first to read Perl How to Program by Deitel, then Learning Perl, then the Camel. The cookbook can wait. It will be awhile before you will need that.
Rating:
Summary: Great way to learn Perl if you can program
Review: I have read some of the other reviews. I beg to differ with some who say that you must be a Unix hacker to use the book. You merely have to be a programmer. This book is great.
This sentence from the book's Preface should be posted prominently on the product purchase page. "Although you don't need to know a single bit about Perl to begin reading this book, we do recommend that you already have familiarity with basic programming concepts such as variables, loops, subroutines, and arrays, and the all-important 'editing a source code file with your favorite text editor.' "
Amazon.com
It is fully accessible to the novice programmer. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inaccurate statement per authors' own statement.
From Book News, Inc.
A guide for both novice and experienced programmers who will find Perl a useful language for the tasks of manipulating text, files, and processes, superseding C, sed, awk, and the UNIX shell. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inaccurate statement per authors' own statement.
Book Info
This new edition has been rewritten to take a ground-up approach for programmers just learning Perl. Softcover. DLC: Perl (Computer Program Language).
Absolutely accurate statement.
The publisher, O'Reilly and Associates
Learning Perl, written by a leading Perl instructor, provides a systematic, step-by-step, tutorial approach to learning the language. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Absolutely accurate statement.
Product Description:
Written by two of the most prominent and active members of the Perl community, this book is the quintessential tutorial to the Perl programming language.
Absolutely accurate statement.
Rating:
Summary: good
Review: I read this book a while ago although I havent played in Perl for a long time this is a great book. If your on a linux/unix based system its even better as I feel its aimed highly towards it since a lot of examples are based on *nix programs such as grep, awk.
I had experience with PHP, so learning the first few chapters were extremely easy (and even without it the text is easy going so it doesnt push you too quickly), it doesnt go over the top by trying to teach radical things like OO and also has a few commonly used Modules you can use.
One good explained topic was Regular Expressions. Ive always found them hard even for a simple expression, however my understanding has greatly improved although I still consider myself a novice with it, it does get explained extremely well.
Overall this is a good book, I didnt find any typos too my knowledge and all the examples that I did worked. Some of the exercises were quite hard though.
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