Rating: 
Summary: An excellent starter into Perl, well worth the money.
Review: If you know little or nothing about Perl, then this is a must. I wanted to be able to write my own CGI scripts for my web site, and I must say this gave me the confidence to write them! It by no means teaches you everything to do with the language, but then I needed a book to get me started and this fitted the bill superbly.Go get it!
Rating: 
Summary: Leaving me with more questions than answers.
Review: My definition of a good dummies book is one that answers questions rather than raise more of them. I've read up to chapter 5 so far in this book and already my mind is swarming with dozens of questions. And it's frustrating knowing that they aren't answered, or at least, not at this point. I'm reading this book from cover to cover - I'm not using it as a reference. I really want to learn Perl. Therefore, I was hoping to truly understand WHY certain things are the way they are in this language... not just that "this does that." That's only 1/2 of the battle in programming. We have to know how these functions/variables relate to each other. That's what programming is all about - relations... but relationships aren't defined clearly (so far) in this book. For example, the author goes through 2 examples of perl programs in Chapter 4. He illustrates what each part of the script does, but this is only partially satisfactory. Half of the displayed functions are definitions, instead of explanations. I found myself asking "Okay, so why is that part important? How does it relate to the other parts? Why does that need to be included? The chomp variable? Why include that here? Sure, I know what it DOES, but why include it here? Which variables are native to Perl and which aren't?" Many, many questions. It feels like Chapter 4 belongs towards the end of the book, after we understand all of the basic functions/variables, etc. I skimmed through the book and found answers to questions I had at the beginning - which isn't very efficient. I understand why something is important about 50% of the time with Perl for Dummies. The other 50% is spent looking in other chapters for answers, doing mental gymnastics in my head, or just moving on, hoping it will be explained in the next page or so. Perhaps he does explain it, but not enough to my satisfaction. Or maybe it's all cleaned up in later chapters. It sounds like he wrote this assuming we would be able to figure out any missing parts. The book needs more clarity. I'm left more confused than enlightened. It was only after applying a bit of my own computer know-how that I finally got a script to work - frustrating when the author doesn't make it clear you can make paths to the files you want to use Perl on. I eventually figured it out... but aren't Dummies books supposed to explain these things? I'm not reviewing this book out of ignorance or disrespect for the author's knowledge and experience. He obviously knows what he is doing. I've programmed in Java before and it's easy to see the similarities. I'm also an experienced web developer. I just wonder how I could be scratching my head so many times when this book is supposed adapt to the fact that I am a dummy. Good start, but gets confusing quickly. If the book gets any better as I read, I will re-review it and adjust its rating accordingly.
Rating:
Summary: Perl 5 for Dummies
Review: Perl for Dummies is a great book. I originally bought the book because I was having problems with some of my code and knew it had to be something small and simple that my other books just weren't telling me. I spent a weekend with the book, solved my problem, and learned more. Hoffman did a good job.
Rating: 
Summary: Warning, this book has no exercises.
Review: Since this book has no exercises, it is of very limited usefulness. I studied with this book for 1 month and did not learn half as much as I did with the Learning Perl book (By Randal Schwartz, Tom Christiansen & Larry Wall; ISBN 1-56592-284-0, 302 pages.). I would not have purchased this book if I had known this beforehand.
Rating: 
Summary: good for Perl, bad for CGI
Review: This book is a very good introduction to Perl. If your goal is to program CGI scripts, however, you will need an additional book. The chapter on CGI uses incomplete examples which cannot be run as-is. This is a change from the previous chapters which provided working examples. To parse incoming data, the author says you should use a perl module called CGI_Lite. But he doesn't tell where to get it, how to install it, or how to set it up and use it. That's not too helpful, especially for a beginners book. You'll need to know some Perl before diving into CGI programming, and this book can give you that base knowledge. Just don't expect it to give you everything you'll need to know to get cgi scripts up and running.
Rating:
Summary: good for Perl, bad for CGI
Review: This book is a very good introduction to Perl. If your goal is to program CGI scripts, however, you will need an additional book. The chapter on CGI uses incomplete examples which cannot be run as-is. This is a change from the previous chapters which provided working examples. To parse incoming data, the author says you should use a perl module called CGI_Lite. But he doesn't tell where to get it, how to install it, or how to set it up and use it. That's not too helpful, especially for a beginners book. You'll need to know some Perl before diving into CGI programming, and this book can give you that base knowledge. Just don't expect it to give you everything you'll need to know to get cgi scripts up and running.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for begginers
Review: This book is an excellent starting place for anyone looking to learn PERL. Wether interested in cgi, database or any application of the language, this book will give you a solid base for understanding the other resources. The begining of the book covers all the most basic programming concepts and moves into web and database elements. Good examples with great explanations! I began reading this book with a very basic understanding of computers and have since written some very complex cgi's. Exellent!
Rating:
Summary: Simply the best to learn Perl!
Review: This book is the absolute best, for people who want to learn Perl in an easy and fun way. I'm 14 years old, and I know HTML and QBasic programming languages. I bought this book, because I wanted to know how to write perl scripts for the web. But this book taught me much more than that! It's an excellent book for beginners, and the language itself is a million times better than Java. This book is worth everything!
Rating:
Summary: Worth its weight in gold!
Review: This book REALLY helped me learn perl. I had tried those online tutorials, they made it sound a WHOLE lot more confusing that it really was. Paul Hoffman is the perfect author for the book. He provides examples of everything, so you can actually SEE how the functions of perl really work. Perl is a great language, and the book was worth its weight in gold!
Rating: 
Summary: Nice Intro to Perl
Review: This book seems to follow the pattern of most Dummies books I've read...give a good overview of the major considerations of the topic at hand, provide a few examples to help give the reader a feeling of empowerment, and indicate that there is much more to learn. I came to this book needing to learn perl well enough to write some simple text modification programs for work. While this book does not replace a semester-long university course on the language (which is what I'm used to), it does give the reader enough information to jump in and start writing some simple perl programs...if your comfortable with the OS you're dealing with and if perl is already installed (I'm not sure I really could have accomplished those tasks with only the knowlege from this book). I guess my take on this book and other Dummies books are like those infamous Cliff Notes from high school...simply reading these books won't make you an expert, but they can give valuable insight and pointers that you might not easily gain on your own. As an additional tool coupled with a little bit of programming experience and the provided perl documentation, Perl for Dummies has helped me get up to speed quickly and complete several important projects...which I don't think I would have been able to do otherwise.
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