Rating: 
Summary: Well written, useful guide for beginners and intermediates
Review: Effective Perl Programming is a concise, well written guide that is packed with useful Perl tips. The book is a series of "Items" (in the same style as Effective C++) that are each a tip about how to use Perl. Each tip is accompanied by a detailed description that discusses the pros and cons or each tip and several examples. The tips are then arranged into sections such as "Regular Expressions" and "Object Oriented Programming". In a relatively small book the authors manage to present an enormous amount of helpful information.This book is a worthwhile purchase if you are a new or intermediate Perl developer. The tips presented here will really help improve your code. However, if you have been working with Perl for a while then this book isn't worth the money. There might be a tip or two that you don't know, but chances are you know most of what is presented.
Rating: 
Summary: Now I get it!
Review: Having learned how to write custom CGI scripts in Perl from just Programming Perl, writting Perl always felt like faking it. Effective Perl Programmings concisely answers all the questions I had and provides tons of great examples. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Simply excellent!
Review: I bought this book while looking for a better foundation in understanding perl programming and that is exactly what I got. This book starts out with the very very basics and moves to the complex in steps that are easy to follow. I would recommend buying this book on the value and price factors alone.
Rating:
Summary: I improved my perl skills with this book everyday...
Review: I have written several good cgi scripts in perl before reading this book. While reading this book, in each page of it thought me more about perl. I learned how to "sort" , "map" , "grep" efficiently from this book. Great tips for efficient regular expressions. I suugest it to every perl programmer.
Rating:
Summary: Write more perl-ish perl
Review: I started writing perl around ten years ago, and at the time my perl looked a lot like the c code I wrote in 1990.. or the FORTRAN code I wrote in 1975! And so it was for many years. But this book, more than any other, helped turn me into an actual perl programmer. It covers the basics- things like 'use "$_" implcitly whenever possible, but don't refer to it explicitly if you don't have to'. There's a good description of slurp mode. And it covers those neat little tricks, like using: ($a,$b)[$a<$b] to return the greater of two scalars. It's not a book for the absolute beginner. But once you've written a few programs and start wondering why your perl doesn't look like that written by the perl gurus, this is the book to get.
Rating:
Summary: Already a Perl programmer? Become a better one!
Review: I've been using Perl casually for a few years now, but when I first got this book six months ago, I sort of skimmed through it and didn't find anything too interesting. But when I started doing a few Perl projects, I kept thinking, "Hey, didn't that book say something about a better way to do this?" So I'd look it up, and an elegant solution to my problem would be there. It's not that I couldn't have done it without the tip, because as all Perl programers know, "There's More Than One Way To Do It", but it taught me a cleaner way than I would have done otherwise. Most tips are no longer than a few pages, and they are neatly organized by topic ("Regular Expressions", "Subroutines", etc.) in the index. Highly recommended for the semi-experienced Perl programmer who is looking to polish their programming skills.
Rating:
Summary: Good book but not for beginners.
Review: It is a good and an inclusive book on Perl programming, but not for beginners to learn Perl. Just like what the book's title says, it tells you how to program perl effectively, but it does not teach you to learn Perl from very beginning. Moverover, the book uses Perl syntax to explain Perl, that is hard for those without any programming experiences. I would use the book as a Perl menu rather than a educational book on Perl. For experienced programmers, it deserves 4 stars.
For beginners, it is a 3-star book.
Rating:
Summary: If you program Perl, this book belongs on your desk.
Review: It's slim, but packed with incredibly useful knowledge. The book is organized as a number of "Issues" each of which has numerous examples and related sub-issues. This book is in the same vein as "The Perl Cookbook", but addresses problems from a more general approach, instead of "How do I do X?". This is not a book for Perl newbies, but after going through "Learning Perl" and hacking a few scripts, a beginner should have encountered some of the issues that this book addresses. The book is readable and the examples are useful. Some of the more useful, but less-understood features of Perl (map, grep are the ones I've encountered so far) are explained quite well. All in all, reading this book should take you from Perl baby-talk to Perl adulthood.
Rating:
Summary: Polish your Perl
Review: Keep this book close at hand. The tips in this book helped me go from mediocre Perl programmer to "good" Perl programmer.
Rating:
Summary: lots of cool tricks
Review: Lots of neat tricks. But some are not taht readible. Be careful with Perl or you can end up with maintenance problems.
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