Rating: 
Summary: Excellent reference for years
Review: I bought and used the Teach yourself Perl in 21 days for Perl 4 and found it extremely usefulI am an experienced programmer with C, Pascal and awk, but a few years ago, I was prepared to do a project in Awk and a fellow programmer recommended that I look into Perl, since it was becoming popular on the web. I picked up "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days" and quickly grew attached to the language. The plusses of the book: -it's well laid out day by day for people just starting out. -Someone with a little more experience can skip most of the the first week and get right into the heart of the language. -It has a useful index. While not perfect, the index lets you get to most everything. My copy is getting ratty, I've used it so much in the last few years. I think anyone who knows another procedural language who wants to learn perl should get this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: Laura Lemay does it again! This book is great if you want to learn Perl from scratch. It's also a great review for those who learned Perl but had forgotten some of the basic concepts. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Not only for newbies...
Review: I used to work with earlier versions of Perl some years ago. Then I paused, and a few weeks ago I was forced to write a script for database over www. First I thought I'll do it in C, but then I remembered about perl's fantastic pattern matching function. But alas! I was already forgotten half of that sweet ugly language. And what I needed now, was a book. A good perl book. Then I saw Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days... What the hell, i thought and bought it. At home I opened it, started to read... and finished on 'Day 4'! It's completely amazing, with little more than a week I'd recovered all my knowledge, and gained a little bit more even out of perl :) Allright, there were unusually lot of typos, but that was the only minus on the book...
Rating:
Summary: Good, for people who wants learn Perl from 0.
Review: But I guess you need to have *some* expirience with other programming languages (HTML, JavaScript, or something similar). Here you will learn how to write programs for Mac, Win, Unix. Not just for Unix. It's very useful, because now perl widly used on different platforms. I will recomend this book as good start. But if you plan to write CGI scripts on Perl, *after* this you defenatly need to get other book, only about CGI scripts.
Rating: 
Summary: a little too harsh in previous review
Review: I wrote a review of this book previously and I feel that I did not point out some really worthy aspects of this book. First of all, in contrast to the vast majority of Perl books out there (including "Learning Perl" by Randal Schwartz), this book covers Perl for both Windows and the Mac, not just Unix. Secondly, the book does not hold itself out to be a complete Perl book. Instead, the author's stated goal is to provide a gentle introduction to Perl to get you to an intermediate level and the book definitely does do that. In going through the typos of this book, I realize that most of the code typos are in the Regular Expressions section where errors are very easy to miss. Finally, when I wrote my first review, the website for the book was not fully operational, but I visited the site again and it now appears to be working fine.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book for newbies.
Review: This book is organized in an extremely useful way. Each chapter contains excercises, explanations and quizes to tackle discreet skills in PERL, with deeper material added at the end of each chapter for those who have already had some programming experience. As a beginner, I found the book very instructive. I felt completely confortable with the pace and scope of the book. On occasion the book assumes a working knowledge of C or C++ in some of its descriptions or comparisons. This is great for those who know C, but I found it frustrating. Other than that caveat, this is the first teach-yourself-how book that I was truly geared for how I learn.
Rating:
Summary: Good book, but typos annoying.
Review: I thought this was a good book if you are wanting the basics of the language itself, but not wanting to delve very deep. I found that there were MANY typos (at least in the first edition of the book) in the text and examples that proved to be somewhat annoying. Overall, it served its purpose.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best 'Teach Yourself' computer books in existence
Review: I have programmed Pascal for a number of years, but when I switched to a Linux system, I found that I was pretty much stuck. Very little Pascal. I thought of learning C++, but then I read a little about Perl. Free, powerful, and with Tk toolkits, you can do GUI programming as well. I picked up this book as it seemed the friendliest of all the tutor books on the shelf. After a couple of days I felt I was really getting somewhere with this strange new language, and by the time I finished the book I was writing quite complex scripts with comparable ease. I don't think I'll be heading along the C++ route at all now! Get this book!
Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: i started out knowing a little bit of C, and no perl, at the end of a week (ok, it didn't take me 21 days... sue me), i was fluent enough to get a job as a perl programmer. This is among the best programming books i have ever read. DOWN WITH THE DUMMIES!
Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT BOOK
Review: I read it all. This is an excellent book for begginers and intermediate. Buy it and after 40 days (not 21 hehehe) You will be a good Perl programmer. (Also good explanation about Regular Expressions)
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