Rating: 
Summary: A hard book to rate
Review: This book is extremely difficult to rate because it has some major strengths and also some major weaknesses. I could pretty much give this book a rating anywhere between 1 and 5 stars and justify it. That being said, I have learned a lot of perl through reading the book & doing the excellent exercises that are provided (with answers), therefore it deserves a decent rating despite its faults. The book is an overview of the language, not a reference. It's a tutorial that takes you through the major language features. Some of the chapters are regular expressions, filehandles, formats, hashes, functions, etc. The writing is generally clear and accessible and the examples are very well done. Most people should feel comfortable using perl after working through this book. The real failing of the book is that it is pitched as a Win32 book but it is full of UNIX-centric examples and idioms. The chapter on DBM is likely to go unused by almost every Windows programmer and there is not much coverage of OLE automation/COM/ActiveX, which is key to Windows. The book would also have benefitted from a look at Windows system administration tasks and how to automate these with perl. Another minor frustration is the "Topics We Didn't Mention" appendix. This book is only 220 pages + appendices, index, forewords and there could easily have been room for discussing those topics (like basic networking, security, the compiler). In short, it's a good book to learn perl with if you're stuck using NT at work like me. That being said, the book is rough around the edges and could be polished significantly in a future edition.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor coverage of CGI, regex, modules and packages etc...
Review: After reading Learning Perl on Win32 Systems, I'm totally convinced that the sole purpose of this book is to promote "Learning Perl" and "Programming Perl" from the -suprisingly- same author. You'd do alot better if you purchase "Learning Perl" and "Programming Perl" straight up from the beginning, subscribe to wellknown mailing list "perl-win32-users" instead of buying this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely excellent book.
Review: Although I have to agree with the other reviewers when it comes to the coverage about Win32 specifics, I found the book excellent overall.
Since I came to the book expecting to learn Perl, just on a Win32 platform, and not how to use Perl to do things like manipulate the registry or do other NT/9x specific sysadmin tasks, I was very pleased with the book.
The concepts are explained slowly and clearly, and in order of importance. It /should/ be said, however, that one cannot expect much coverage of things like object-oriented Perl, closures, and creation of complex data structures with references in this book.
If you're looking for that, you'd be better off with Programming Perl.
Rating:
Summary: Dont mess about - just buy it
Review: Clear, concise and to the point examples back up a well thought through and sensibly paced book. I liked the way that win32 issues were clearly dealt with - no'more trying to work out why your UNIX based examples dont work. This book is excellent value for the $$ - you'll easily recoup in saved time the cover price. Tom
Rating:
Summary: Worthy new version of a good book
Review: Finally, a good book on Perl on Windows systems. Recently, I had to start writing Perl on NT after doing Perl for 8 years on UNIX. I was very frustrated due to the changes in Perl to make it work (the source of the problem is NT limitations) and the lack of good documentation on NT Perl. This books solves that need.
Rating: 
Summary: For Twice the Price Go Buy The CD With All 6 Books
Review: Go search for it on Amazon- "The Perl CD Bookshelf"
Rating:
Summary: good starter book
Review: I agree that Chapter 1 was a bit challenging, but after working my way through it, the familiarity of seeing some of these things as I work through the rest of the book is actually very helpful. If you are coming from a zero-programming-skills background, you should probably look at the book before you buy it, but if you understand any type of programming logic, this book should provide a great beginner path to learning Perl.
Rating:
Summary: Generic perl topic are OK, Win32 and NT specifics are poor
Review: I bought this book as starter to learn more about Perl in general (and for Win32 systems). I found the very first chapters to be of good service, though I spotted these elementary Perl programming techniques in other O'Reilly books too. The Win32 part is in my opinion very poor, it doesn't explain things very well like OLE, reading/writing the Event log and other rudimentary system administration tasks. If you have a lot of free time on your hands like I sometimes tend to have, take some time to search for example scripts for Win32, and together with this book you will be able to understand. Though I think a new edition would be a good idea, covering specifically Win32 platform (people should buy other books to learn Perl in general, I do not like to see the same 3 chapters in every book over again).
Rating:
Summary: Shallow, but a Helpful Intro to Perl for Win32 People
Review: I concur with the bulk of the reviews here: This is a shallow book, especially given Perl's scope. But it WILL help Windows folks understand many of the key Perl concepts that otherwise go unmentioned. And that's the major point here. The book may be a trivial intro to Perl, but at least it doesn't assume you're a *NIX weenie. After getting annoyed reading the 3rd edition of the camel book, I bought this book. It was helpful in clearing up all those references to the weird stuff that *NIX dudes apparently are born knowning, and got me quickly into writing simple Perl scripts. You want heavy details of the Win32 or NT-specific functions? Go read the POD embedded in those modules. Or get a different book. This is "LEARNING Perl on Win32 Systems"... I read it in about 6 hours, total, cover to cover. And in that time it provided just about as good an intro as I could hope for.
Rating:
Summary: Shallow, but a Helpful Intro to Perl for Win32 People
Review: I found that this book was good, particularly for the Win32 platform, and recommend it to anyone who uses Windows, regardless of their initial interest in programming. The only problems I had with the book are that the CGI (and OOP, which is introduced only in the context of CGI...but it could be so much more) chapter is left in limbo as far as being able to use any of the examples. If it were used on a Unix webserver (which are almost always setup to handle Perl CGI scripts), the examples would work fine. However, this is Perl for Win32, so IIS or PWS (if possible...I don't think it is, however) should be the web platforms targetted, and a "quick and dirty" setup instruction would be good to be able to test those examples.
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