Rating: 
Summary: Love the footnotes and asides
Review: For now the only thing I can say is that I breezed through the Regular Expressions chapters in one night. Learned nearly all I had to learn about that most important facet of programming from this book. Glad I did because I just donwloaded VIM text editor and can now use regular expressions to do searches on my documents. I've also begun using regular expressions in JavaScript. Thought it was such a formidable subject when I encountered it the first time around in JS. Piece of cake. Thanks to the Llama book.If you don't learn Perl from this book, you'll at least enjoy the jokes and asides that are practically on every page.
Rating: 
Summary: Rare entertainment in a programming book
Review: This book is a well-paced intoduction to Perl. They cover sticking points like "context" (which is how Perl is so free flowing) to the point where you are dam(n) sure to have it straight. Short examples highlight everything, and the lessons it comes with (with explanations at the back) are a very, very nice touch.
As a bonus, it's funny and engagingly written. Follow this one up with Programming Perl, the much faster paced 'mother book' of Learning Perl.
Rating:
Summary: Still using for UNIX admin
Review: This is a great learning book. It has many good examples. However, I was in two classes that tried to expand on the examples. It took excessively long to find small syntax problems. If you are used to "c" you can make one-liners with out using those curly brackets (braces), in perl you do not find out that this does not work until you try to run the program. Keeping with that thought this book is of very little help to anyone that does not already know UNIX scripting and concepts. In addition, if you are doing CGI and want pictures, there are some here.
Rating: 
Summary: Not The Best
Review: This book _is_:
-funny
-relatively concise
-a decent book on the language This book _is not_:
-good for the beginning perl programmer. Basically, this book tries to cover too much in some areas and not nearly enough of some other topics. Hashes get their own chapter, but it's miniscule. On the other hand, the intricacies of dealing with list v. scalar context are covered in depth. From personal experience, however, hashes are one of the most useful features of perl. My suggestion: start with perlmonks.org and the Camel. Between the two of them, you'll find everything you need to know.
Rating:
Summary: My 2 cents on Learning Perl
Review: first of all, I'd like to say that I was once one of those people that thought Learning Perl was too hard and had an excessive amount of Unix, C and other Unix related languages. At that time, I had 0% knowledge of Unix, and despite what the authors said in the foreword, saying they removed many of the Unix referrences, I could still find wayyy too many. I struggled through Chapter 1, finally finishing it. Then, came monster #2, Chapter 2. I finished it a week later and Chapter 3 took me the same time. Chapter 4 took me three days to finish and understand, and I constantly had to go back to see what the authors meant in an example or exactly WHAT they were talking about. I struggled on and on until Chapter 7, where I gave up. After a couple of weeks passed, I decided to give Learning Perl a second try. I reread from scratch, and wow, was it easy! I still had no knowledge of Unix, but rereading it the second time was so much easier and I read Chapters 2 and 3 in 3 days or so. I was able to read the whole book, struggling ALOT on Regular Expressions, getting confused along the way, struggling. Chapter 14 was way too confusing, even though by the time I got to it I already had Linux and very few Unix knowledge; Chapter 14 was too technical on signals and low level programming and high level programming, things a newbie wouldn't understand. But I didn't wine about this. Instead, I thanked the author. See, you're learning Perl, while learning Unix here. The difficulty level of the book is one of those barriers you have to overcome. Difficulty isn't necessairily bad. Training a newbie to have good foundations from the start is a good thing. Once that barrier is broken, one can understand difficult concepts instead of getting stuck later on in life and being laughed at for not knowing Perl. All in all, this book was great. Remember, hard isn't necessairily always bad.
Rating: 
Summary: Average
Review: It covers the basics, but the author's have a poor writing style which includes a lot of wandering and bad jokes.
Rating:
Summary: The most well written book for learning a new language.
Review: I've been programming for the last 8 years and have read many programming books. The animal books (O'Reilly) tend to be the best anyway, but this one takes the cake. The Llama, as this book is affectionately referred to in the Perl community, is concise and its chapters are broken up in a way that makes it very easy to read and understand. That's probably because the authors have been teaching Perl for years. The authors write with a pure love for the language and a good, but not forced, sense of humor. Once you've graduated from this book, The Camel (Programming Perl) and the Perl Cookbook are the next step. I strongly recommend The Llama to anyone learning perl.
Rating:
Summary: Way overrated
Review: I hate to slam a book that is considered such an essential book in the community. But I feel compelled. First, the good points: It has great reference sections. Very, very important for such a book. It is also reasonably comprehensive. Sure, you'll probably also want Perl Cookbook to really know what you are doing, but it's too much to ask for Learning Perl to contain such practical uses. It crams so much more in than most programming books. As for the bad, I could rant for a long time, but I will try to be brief. First, the book's organization leaves much to be desired. While the macro-organization is perhaps reasonable enough, a trial lawyer would have a field day with the objection, "Facts assumed not in evidence." There are numerous code snippets in this book that are only understandable at even the most basic level by flipping ahead 100 pages, then cross-referencing to the appendix and then flipping back to a different chapter. A novice programmer shouldn't have to deal with terms like "grep" or the like until the definition of "grep" is actually given since, after all, the last time I checked, "grep" was not a standard phrase in the English language that is understandable to all. The book is written for people with a broad background in programming. For example, the reference section, which is supposed to describe the functions in depth describes how the command "printf" works as follows: "This is similar to the C library's printf(3) and fprintf(3) functions." While there was some other gobbledygook in his listing, none of the gobbledygook explained how the function worked. Last time I checked, the book was titled Programming Perl, not Programming C, Volume II. Why its only description for how the function actually works is a reference to another language is typical of the breezy arrogance of the authors. This was more egregious than most other examples, but in general, the authors were telling their story to insiders who needed a refresher course, not people who wanted to hear the story from the beginning. In retrospect, after reading other books about programming, most horrifying to me is the utter lack of disregard for good programming standards at the most basic level. The authors seem to glorify the "Obfuscated Perl" approach, which is to write the language in as tightly wound and obfuscated a way as possible. This is simply bad programming, even it does take a very smart person to understand what's going on. Ideally, good code should be readable like a novel, if you have a basic understanding of the language. In a good novel, you don't flip back and forth between pages trying to remember who or what something was. Variables and subroutines should have clear, unambiguous names. Variables should be clearly spelled out, as opposed to the way the authors (and most Perl programmers) seem to think is best, which is to refer to such constructs as $_[1], requiring one to flip pages to where the subroutine was called to understand what information is being passed to the the subroutine. Rather than taking the attitude -- almost universally held in the Perl community -- that There Is More Than One Way To Do It, the authors should have emphasized, You Might Want To Think About The Option That Will Make It Easier For You And Others To Understand Your Code When You Look At It 3 Months From Now. Journalists don't score points for writing obscure text. Yes, they can write things any way they like, but they have professional standards - codified in the AP Style Guide, among other places - that say that certain ways of doing things are better for readers. Programmers should adopt a similar way of thinking - both about the readibility and workability of code -and this book does everything to undermine this notion.
Rating:
Summary: Only a overview of Perl
Review: It is a very brief introduction book to Perl without many details. This book gives you the overview of Perl and make you feel you can learn Perl fast and easy(Probably it is the good part of this book). But basically you can not accomplish your daily work task only after finish reading this book. My suggestion is to buy "Programming Perl" and "Perl cookbook" together. "Programming Perl" is a good reference book and "Perl cookbook" is full of examples using Perl. Recommend this book to anyone who only wants to know what Perl is, but not the professionals who need to learn Perl for heavy usage.
Rating:
Summary: THE perl tutorial
Review: I've been through this book several times. I went through the 2nd edition on my own a couple of years ago when I learned perl. I have since (after a year of hiatus from perl) been through the 3rd edition in a classroom setting. The 3rd edition is much improved in terms of structure and pace. For example, explanation of regular expressions (one of the most powerful features of perl) is expanded into three chapters. On the down side, I would have liked to see a chapter or two covering references and OOP.
The authors are clearly expert coders and have an intimate knowledge of perl. The prose is clear and deliberate, over-simplifying when helpful, but being sure to point you to the details in footnotes. The book is also laced with wry humor that both makes the dryness of such a topic more palatable and serves as an introduction to the quirkiness of "perl culture" in general.
If you are a beginner in Perl, and have some programming experience in another language, this is the one to get. Not a great reference, but a great tutorial.
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