Rating: 
Summary: Good intro to Perl, not very NT specific
Review: The book is well-written and I worked through it in two days and enjoyed it. The style is conversant and nice to read, which makes it a very good introduction to Perl if you happen to work on NT. The book is not a Nutshell book, does not contain very much NT specifics and is probably not worth the money if you already know Perl. In short: the book is exactly what the title says it is.
Rating: 
Summary: Not enough depth
Review: The book was easy enought to read, and it represents the information in a simplistic manner, but it does not provide the depth needed to really program in Perl for a Win32 subsystem. Try the book by David Roth.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: The O'Reilly books are definately THE books to get if you are interested in Perl. The two Learning Perl books (Unix and Win32) are easy to read and understand and great for a person first learning Perl. The Perl Cookbook is incredibly useful for someone trying to figure out how to do some of the more advanced things. I wish there were books like this for Java. This book, although it says win32, can be applied to Unix. At least about 95% of it is transferrable to Unix. Perl is an interpreted language, therefore it is Platform independent except when you make system specific calls to the OS.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the faint of heart
Review: This book definitely wasn't all that it was meant to be I'm sure. Even with a background in programming it didn't accomplish much in actually helping to learn PERL, imagine if it was a non-programmer. The text was written in a fashion which can easily lose the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Too simple for programmers
Review: This book doesn't have enough in depth coverage of PERL. For a programmer, this book is too simple, for a non-programmer, this book is too hard.
Rating:
Summary: Good intro to PERL, a Programmer's language
Review: This book is a good introduction to the PERL language. It is written well, and it is written to a specific audience, programmers. If you are a programmer of another language you will have the patience to get through the PERL language, a compact, powerful, but non-intuitive language. PERL is not, NOT, for non-programmers, despite the plethora of '21 days', 'for <whatever>' etc books. That said, of the PERL books, this 'gecko' (as well as the 'llama') book offers the most well-organized, best-written, and best-edited (the programs actually run) introduction to the language. Plus, there is a web site that specifically supports this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Ok language intro, but missing context
Review: This book provided a reasonable introduction to the language elements. As a complete novice, I learned enough to read CGI scripts. It was helpful to work on the well-done examples and then to look at the answers. I would have preferred a "log cracking" example rather than "secret words". Although I got the syntax of the hashes, I missed their glory in solving problems. The regular expression examples were good, but I could have used a full-blown example here also. This book sent me searching for CGI/web packages, such as the database package DBI (which may have been more useful than the DBM), the graphics package (GD), and more on writing HTML code from Perl scripts.
Rating:
Summary: Ok language intro, but missing context
Review: This book provided a reasonable introduction to the language elements. As a complete novice, I learned enough to read CGI scripts. It was helpful to work on the well-done examples and then to look at the answers. I would have preferred a "log cracking" example rather than "secret words". Although I got the syntax of the hashes, I missed their glory in solving problems. The regular expression examples were good, but I could have used a full-blown example here also. This book sent me searching for CGI/web packages, such as the database package DBI (which may have been more useful than the DBM), the graphics package (GD), and more on writing HTML code from Perl scripts.
Rating:
Summary: Good way to learn perl
Review: This is a good way to start learning perl. The examples are pretty easy and short. Much easier to understand than the camel book, which I use more as a reference and not as a learning tool. This book prepares you for the camel book, and the 2 books together gives you a solid understanding. I managed to find a lucrative consulting job doing cgi programming after reading these two books.
Rating:
Summary: O'Right - O'Reilly!
Review: This is a great place to start learning Perl. As a first exposure to THE standard text-processing language of the web, this is as good as you will find. I think some of the reviewers who rated the book lower were probably discouraged with the learning curve of the language more than the quality of the material. Save money and buy the Perl CD Bookshelf (also O'Reilly), which includes Learning Perl on Win32.
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