Rating: 
Summary: A great way to learn perl
Review: I've tried to learn perl several times before with different books, manuals and tutorials all unsuccessfully. It wasn't until I started using this book that I really 'got' perl. Each element of the language is explained in clear and simple terms. As a result, I'm now finding perl quite accessible and even fun, something that I would have sworn was not possible before.
Rating: 
Summary: Tutorial? maybe. Reference? no.
Review: If you are going to buy many books on Perl this might be one to buy early. It plods through some simple examples.If you only plan to buy one Perl book, keep looking. This is not a good reference. You only get glimpses of topics, and information is hard to find. If you only want to learn enough perl to solve a particular problem, keep looking, unless of course your problem happens to be like one of the examples.
Rating:
Summary: Useless -- don't waste your money or time
Review: Learing to code requires that you be able to practice what you've just read. This book offers no excersies thus the reader is left to stumble along on their own. The examples are limited and simplistic, and, considering that the book is designed for beginners, it lacks teaching of proper programming fundementals. I don't recommend this book either for begginer's or as a perl referenece manual
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of money
Review: Oh, come on! It would've been better just typing $ man perl. This book is entirely filled with very condescending and useless examples, followed by incredibly tedious explanation, not to mention thousands of errors. After comparing it with camel book, I found I had wasted 40 bucks for garbage.
Rating: 
Summary: A one-stop perl reference guide!
Review: Perl By Example has become my desktop bible for all things Perlish. While O'reilly books dominate my collection for everything else, Ellie Quigley has put together an excellent reference manual. Stop here if you are the type that "Learns by Example".
Rating:
Summary: Great at first glance, but actually not
Review: Perl by Example seems to be great at first glance, but actually it's not, when you read carefully into it. The author tried to use examples to illustrate her ideas. However, due to the enormous amount of errors in the examples, I can hardly trust them. I'm wondering whether the author has tried her code on a real machine. Or maybe the code worked at a certain point, but got changed during the author's revision or printing. Thanks to my background in C/C++, I can identify some errors easily. Yet there may be more errors that I didn't realize. Here are some of the examples in the book that either don't work at all, or don't give the output as described: Ex4.49, Ex5.12, Ex 6.21, Ex6.32, Ex7.5, Ex7.9, Ex7.18. Overall, I don't recommend the book to anyone taking Perl as the first programming language. If you have some background in other programming language, and would like to think about how to fix code in the textbook and play around, it's the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Concur with fella from Oregon - Sucks!
Review: Please do not waste your money on Perl By Example. It is very referency and not as good as Perl POD. If you must by this style of book at least look at the similarly titled Perl 5 By Example written by the same writer. There are several other Perl books worth getting. If you do not have all the O'Reilly books then go get those. Then get Effective Perl.
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Summary: Examples from Perl by Example
Review: The blurb on the cover of the 3rd edition said: "Full cross-platform coverage... including Windows and Macintosh." If you think you will not need Unix knowledge, take a look at this example from page 52: The $_ Scalar Variable: "... When used as a pattern space for searches, it behaves like sed. When used to hold the current line, it is like the $0 variable in awk." If this is clear to you, buy the book.
Rating:
Summary: Can do better
Review: The examples in the book are tedious and not real-world. Some of the code doesn't work. There are some helpful things but get the O'Reilly books instead.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book is a superb resource for new and intermediate users. Every point is presented with sample input, sample code, the output, and a detailed explanation. Also, the paper is sturdy
the binding is good, and the type size is readable. I strongly recommend this book.
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