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Rating: 
Summary: great portable reference guide
Review: handy little reference guide for perl programmers -- pocket sized, if you have wide pockets.
Rating: 
Summary: Only benefit is portability..
Review: I have yet to find any of the O'Reily reference books to be useful. They are poorly organized, and it's REALLY hard to find answers to quick questions. I LOVE almost all of the reference companion books. I'd say that you should save the dough on this reference and just buy another copy of the "Perl 5" camel book unless you're desperate for a more portable size.
Rating: 
Summary: Not one of their best Pocket References
Review: Maybe there is too much to Perl to squeeze into one tiny guide? Maybe Perl can't be organized like that? For whatever reason, I find Learning Perl (another great O'Reilly book) to be the perfect "Pocket" reference, even though it's a standard book. This Pocket reference is too small to be of any real use, unlike many of their other Pocket references.
Rating:
Summary: Could be much better
Review: The Perl 5 pocket reference is a nice handy little tool if you are willing to search for things. Unfortunately, the book does not come with such things as an index - a must in reference books.The book is organized by category - not alphabetically, therefore making it harder to find the information in question. If the book included a few examples, an index, and perhaps a different organization scheme, it would be a much better book. Unfortunately it isn't, therefore sending me elsewhere for reference.
Rating:
Summary: A mnemonic device, nothing more
Review: This book is little more than a list of perl methods to help jog your memory. If you're fluent in perl but sometimes need to remember the name of a method, this book can help you. But you'd better be able to remember the proper syntax on your own, since the book doesn't include it (granted, perl is fluid enough to make that an easy guess too). If you want a language reference, this book isn't it. It's like carrying a set of flash cards. If you don't know it to begin with, this book won't help you learn it. Even as a reference I found it lacking.
Rating:
Summary: A mnemonic device, nothing more
Review: This book is little more than a list of perl methods to help jog your memory. If you're fluent in perl but sometimes need to remember the name of a method, this book can help you. But you'd better be able to remember the proper syntax on your own, since the book doesn't include it (granted, perl is fluid enough to make that an easy guess too). If you want a language reference, this book isn't it. It's like carrying a set of flash cards. If you don't know it to begin with, this book won't help you learn it. Even as a reference I found it lacking.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect Companion
Review: This is just what I needed - a quick reminder to refresh my memory occasionally without referring to the other perl books or docs. It's small and inexpensive -I keep one at home and one at the office. This book is great for jogging your memory to remind you of use and syntax but it should not be relied on as a true "reference". If you have the Camel and the Llama book this is a perfect addition.
Rating:
Summary: Too pint-sized to be useful
Review: This reference is perhaps too brief. I find myself skipping it and going straight for Programming Perl. If I need to quickly look up the usage of a function, the Unix man pages are far more useful -- and faster.
Rating:
Summary: It could have been perfect....
Review: Why such a small book wastes 2 pages on a useless forward by Larry Wall is beyond me. Larry should stick to writing code.
Rating:
Summary: Nearly Perfect Reference Guide
Review: With the addition of an index and references to perldoc commands, and updated material for Perl 5.6, this reference guide is virtually all a Perl programmer needs. To steal from Larry Wall's Foreward from this book, it's really hard to write a review about something this perfect. I do wish the book had some extra material: a link to where to get a copy of Perl, some tips on using the -w switch and "use strict" to find bugs, an explanation of the basic perldoc options, a link to the Perl newsgroups and guidelines for posting to them, a few more choice examples of code. To steal from Larry's Foreward again, this information would have made things ever so much easier if I'd had it *before* I started writing in Perl... Update: I'm not sure why other reviewers are saying that this reference is not very useful. Until today, this book has been my only Perl reference for over a year and thousands of lines of Perl code, except for occasionally using perl's built-in help. I did refer to Programming Perl today to find how to make a hash slice on a hash reference that is stored in a hash, but unless you're writing something complicated like that, this pocket reference tells you how to do it. If you really can think of something that's missing, be sure to visit the O'Reilly web site and give them the feedback!
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