Rating: 
Summary: Why read anything else?
Review: Everyone who complains about this book not being tutorial enough is obviously in the wrong spot. As a professional programmer, this text delivers on every front: guts, details, examples, alternative programmatic methods, pitfals, etc., etc., etc. If you have ever written any REAL software systems or applications in any mainstream language, this book will allow you to smoothly incorporate Perl into your arsenal...
Rating: 
Summary: A terrible programming book I've ever read
Review: This is not a good book for a technical or a new Perl user. There's a few examples for new users and little programming information for experts. On the other hand, you can find a lot of unneccessary information about mathematic, philosopher, "love story" in this book. For example: to explain the filehandles: "Unless you are using artificial intelligence to model a solipsistic philosopher, your program needs some way to communicate with outside world"; to explain operators "..and as we know in studying math in school, mathematicians love strange symbols. What's worse, computer scientist have come up with their own version of these strange symbol... You could find hundreds of sentences like these in the book but you could not find a good example to tell you how to write a package, object class, etc. It' not worth the money.
Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: I bought this book to learn programming Perl as fast as possible. With my knowledge of other languages I could just read through the first three chapters and get started after that. The way the book is written, the funny comments about examples etc. make it a lot of fun to read!
Rating:
Summary: A Serious Language Book
Review: I recommend you buy a Perl book if you really want to learn Perl, and, buy this one. "Learning Perl" is also a good one. However, it covers too little of perl, not even references and modules. On the other hand, it says more about the interactions between Perl and other stuff, e.g., files, directories, processes, CGI... which is absent from Programming Perl.In a word, Programming Perl is a more serious language reference, and more likely to be frequently refered to.
Rating:
Summary: Terrific Book.
Review: Wow, look at that price. You get more than 600 pages of invaluable instruction. Some have said this book is hard to understand. My approach would be to buy the Learning Perl book as a primer. You could read it in a day or two. Then dive into to this gem. It probably helps to have a purpose for learning perl when you start reading these books. If you just blindly read them they may seem dry and technical due to the fact that you may not have a use for what you are learning. I would suggest that you go ahead and buy the Perl Cookbook when ordering this book. You can do without it but you may spend way to much time figuring things out and end up doing them in a very messy way. Hope this info helps you make a purchase decision!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Useless if you have no previous Perl knowledge
Review: I bought this book upon recommendation from a friend and the reviews I found in this space and I began reading it and quickly became disenfranchised. It assumes quite a bit of Perl knowledge and doesn't explain basic operations clearly. The huge example that pops into my head is Pattern Matching with the =~ operator. I read through the sections several times and eventually ended up scouring the Web for an example that did what I want. I have not found this book to be the "Bible" it has been called by others, and most of the information can be found at www.perl.com. I have read that Perl Cookbook is a collection of examples, which used to be part of Programming Perl, but were removed and put into their own book. Maybe that would be a better book for me. Maybe for everybody. As far as I am concerned, after having done a bit of Perl programming, all this book is good for is telling you what / how many arguments get passed to functions. It was also handy when I wanted to know in what variable the arguments got stored (@ARGV I believe). I learned much more from picking apart a 30 line script than I did from this book.
Rating: 
Summary: This book has devolved with time
Review: Another example of a second-edition being much less worthwhile than the first. The first was good, solid, full of examples. Then O'Reilly decided they could milk the Perl market by splitting what you needed to know across three books. If you can find the first edition, but it. This new one is a waste of money.
Rating:
Summary: Buy it with the Cookbook!
Review: I had to learn Perl from scratch and this book was all I had. Even though it saved my life, I would not recommend it without a few words of caution. The book is quite cryptic, lacks good references, assumes a lot of prior knowledge and has inadequate examples. If you are going to buy it, make sure you get the Perl Cookbook at the same time. It'll save a lot of time and energy!
Rating:
Summary: A Keeper
Review: This book is perfect if you're making the transition from a different programming language. It's also perfect as a reference. I've read other Perl books, nothing compares to this one. Like I said...a keeper.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful book, but be carefull while reading it !!
Review: I am student in Computer Engineering. So I found PERL Language the suitable entrance for web-based programming. After searching the web for books cover this task I found this book, really it is usefull, but I think advanced readers must have carefull while buying it, because - as I saw - it is completely oriented for beginners.
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