Rating: 
Summary: A must-have classic
Review: Although it lacks Wall's witty foreword, the latest edition of O'Reilly's introductory Perl book is still a must-have classic. The cast has changed slightly, with Tom Phoenix replacing Tom Christiansen, and the principal author Randal Schwartz staying same. Probably the most experienced Perl instructors around, these guys have been training Perl programmers for a living since 1985 at their firm Stonehenge Consulting. Don't let the name fool you, these guys aren't Druids, they're thoroughly modern programmers. Completely rewritten, the latest edition of this introductory Perl book is based on their Stonehenge "Learning Perl" course and instructor notes they've refined and road-tested over the years. They've simplified and reorganized the text for easier comprehension, with each set of exercises short enough for a 45-60 minute class. Yes, this book and its companion, "Programming Perl" are popular textbooks for college Perl programming courses. Even the jokes are better (be sure to read the footnotes, where most of them are). Perl is ideal for quick and dirty programming, to automate repeated tasks. About 90% of Perl scripts are short ones, from 2 to 128 lines of code. That's what this book is designed to do, get you up to speed fast on the basics and defaults, and start cranking out useful short programs. For longer programs you can always hire a consultant, or read the sequel, "Programming Perl" and do it yourself. I'd normally include a summarized table of contents here, but you're going to buy the book anyway. One nice change I enjoyed was the old regular expression chapter has been expanded into three, which makes this essential Unix tool easy to learn. Highly recommended. From WebReference.com.
Rating:
Summary: Good for newbies.
Review: If you have little or no programming experience then this book is THE place to start learning about Perl. But if you are an experienced programmer then I highly advise that you skip this book as it is very very basic and instead go straight to the book "Programming Perl".
Rating: 
Summary: Good book--but getting a little long in the tooth
Review: This review is for the second edition of this book. Learning Perl is a good book for beginners. But alot has changed since 1997 (when it was published). If you want to learn the "basics" of Perl and are just gonna play around with Perl, this is one of the books for you. If you need to learn Perl for use in a production environment, you should look at some of the newer O'Reilly books on Perl. This book is just too old and outdated for me to give it more than 3 stars
Rating:
Summary: The Essential
Review: This book can be considered to be a part of a two part series - first you read this book, then you read "Programming Perl," after which time you start writing poetry in Perl. This book offers a good introduction to Perl with very little knowledge needed, but it does not bore someone experienced in shell scripting or general programming. The sequence of events starts a bit slow, but picks up as experience grows. The exercises are exactly as they should be - they offer a good chance to get experience but don't feel as if they are coming out of the blue. They usually involve extending or changing the example programs given earlier in the chapter, and they are usually something that once you grasp the underlying concept will take very little time to implement. The title is very appropriate. There is a lot to Perl that is not covered (at least in any depth) in this book. The much thicker Programming Perl book takes up that slack, but the existance of this book is inspiring - you can read this book to learn enough perl to use for most practical purposes - and then have a good foundation when jumping into the "big book" - I like that approach to learning programming languages and I like this book.
Rating: 
Summary: timid steps to Learning Perl
Review: Hello friend. New to Perl? New to programming? Unfortunately, I do not feel that Perl is a good language for newbies. I would also recommend some UNIX background before trekking into Perl. Otherwise "Learning Perl" is a good beginning book for those serious about Perl. Perl is a neat little language. Handy in many ways, but the essence of Perl is often much more difficult. If you wish to one day call yourself a Perl guru, you are in for a journey. In this case, "Learning Perl" is just a first step into the world of Perl. The companion camel book "Programming Perl" is a good comprehensive reference book to Perl. "Effective Perl Programming" is another essential book on style and traps. On the other hand, if you want a book to help you with a simple script, there are probably more specific resources/books available. I rate this book 4 stars because it's a good book, but Perl is not an easy language like this book may lead beginners to think.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for experienced computer scientists or programmers
Review: I highly recommend learning Perl to anyone working in computer science, but I can't in good faith recommend Learning Perl to anyone who considers him or herself an experienced programmer. The book proceeds very slowly and is pretty short, meaning that in the end you'll know only the very basics of Perl. In fact, many of the footnotes refer the reader to Programming Perl or to the perl manpages to get the "real story" on some issue that Learning Perl glosses over. If you intend to learn Perl (and more than the very basics), you will probably end up reading through Programming Perl or many of the Perl manpages. I would consider Learning Perl only as an optional primer for those not already fluent in one or more languages like C. Otherwise you will spend some time reviewing the semantics of while loops, what a file handle is, etc. You will have learned the basics of pattern matching and Perl's syntax and idioms, but you may as well cut to the chase and learn from Programming Perl. On the other hand, I am coming from a theoretical computer science background (the CS program at Carnegie Mellon University); Learning Perl may very well be appropriate for have never used anything more sophisticated than a scripting language. However, even beginning programmers should be aware that Learning Perl assumes familiarity with a Unix environment. (But see also: Learning Perl on Win32 Systems). If you have doubts, at least take a look at the perl manpages. They come free with every distribution of perl.
Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners
Review: I picked up this book the same time I started a beginning Unix class. I'm mainly a windows person, but want to broaden my skills into the Unix world, also the class was going so slow, I figured I could teach myself perl in my spare time. Wrong. I have had programming classes before, in Basic, Fortran, Pascal, and Cobol. With this book, by page 13 he was covering arrays, hashes, and other terms I just didn't quite get. I can follow the examples in the book, but I'm wondering why the syntax is so funky. I put the book down, and picked it up again after finishing my Unix class. The terms make much more sense now after being exposed to regular expressions, grep, sed, awk, etc. I'm going to give it a second try, but I dont' think I'm really going to learn this well outside of a classroom.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: It's the ideal introduction if you have some basic knowledge in C and Unix. No boring introduction, it jumps right into the world of Perl. If some of the reviews here are complaining about Chapter 1--I think it's great and the "Stroll Through Perl" is very well and detailed explained in the following chapters. If you have no idea what Perl is about but know enough about Unix and programming that a "loop" is nothing weird for you--get this book!
Rating:
Summary: For someone who knows how to program, but doesn't know perl.
Review: If you already know how to program and don't want to wade through chapters of 'this is a variable' 'this is a string' this book is for you. Everything you need to know to write useful perl programs is covered.
Rating:
Summary: Like the Camel Book, only smaller!
Review: This gripping tale of a man who cannot find a reasonable set of instructions to get started with programming Perl. In desperation, he tries the Camel book: alas! The text assumes too much, he understands the concepts, but cannot put them together to create something meaningful.Then, behold! The Lama book! He sits down for a pleasant evening, hoping to discover that the Lama book will unfold the mysteries of programming to him, and take his fluffy English-major brain and force some structure on it: make him learn to think logically and linerally.No. The Lama book does not do it either. He drops the book to the floor, with tears welling in his eyes. Will he never be satisfied? Will he ever find the Perfect Beginners Text?He thinks that he'll just skip Perl and do Python instead.
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