Rating: 
Summary: This book was not written by Perl programmers
Review: A Perl novice picking this book up will be impressed. It's big, the prose is good, and it seems to have a command of the subject.
This is all misleading. The book was written by professional authors who pick up a language as they write a book. Perl isn't like other langauges - the mindset and featureset are completely different. Writing effective Perl means getting a grasp on ideas taken from awk, sed, Lisp, C++, sh, and a dozen other places. This book teaches Perl as if it were another C dielect with a funny syntax. This certainly makes it easy to "leaern Perl", but after reading over 800 pages, you'll actually learn very little Perl. And no wonder - large amounts of this book were cut and paste verbatum from other books Dietel wrote about C++ and Visual Basic! Nothing unique to Perl is discussed, such as Perl's excellent date manipulation fascilities, object serialization, or indeed any module beyond the CGI module (on which a thousand books have been written).
Descriptions of features are vague and half hearted showing lack of a clear understanding. To someone who knows Perl, this book sounds like a homework assignment where someone read about Perl and then wrote about their findings, uncertainties and all.
Throughout the book, code listings basically work (I worked hard on that as a paid technical reviewer - my name is in the credits - and this was no small task) but they too completely miss the style, spirit, and indeed the point of programming Perl. They're riddled with security holes. They don't leverage modules, and Perl's CPAN repository is probably it's greatest strength.
I don't like writing bad reviews. I don't like having failed to have persuaded the authors to address security. I wanted to like this book since it was the first I've worked on. With lots of help from people who truly grasp Perl this book could have been medicore but Dietel's production-line like business model doesn't allow for this. Books need to be written by experts or at least senior members of the community. Rank novices cannot just read other books and repeat back their findings and call it a book. Or perhaps you honestly believe that Dietel has mastered every language on the sun and had plenty of time left over to write an 800 page book about the language they learned last month.
As with any bad review, you should be asking what motivated the bad review. Often it's a frustrated novice. Sometimes it's pure snobbery. Other times it's religion or a burnt employee. I'm not a Perl novice; I've been programming for 21 years now and I've been programming in Perl quite heavily for about 6 of those. I'm a bit of a Perl snob but only because there are so many really excellent books like Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Beginning Perl, CGI Programming with Perl, and scores of others. Dietel treated me very well and paid me fairly (again, I wish I could give an average review). I'm just writing this review to temper the initial impressions of those first learning Perl with a slightly more educated assessment.
If you want one massive book with loads and loads of Perl knowledge, Computer Science & Perl Programming was collectively written by about 20 of the best known Perl hackers who have developed the most important modules, worked on the core, and spoke and written more often than anyone else. And while CS&PP has nearly the same page count, it costs half as much. Besides being more thorough, more insightful, more interesting, and in better style, it's a heck of a lot of fun.
In short, Perl: How to Program is just another in-it-for-the-money amaturely written Perl+CGI book with a lot of padding and little insight.
Rating: 
Summary: It's My Choice
Review: As a professional consultant, I have to be ready to provide the client with a quality product. At times, a client will have a change of mind. That's what happened to me when I suddenly found myself requiring a working knowledge of PERL. I bought Deitel's PERL book, and was very impressed with their writing and teaching style. This book goes much more in depth than any of the "Teach Yourself..." books, and the text is clear. The CD that is included had everything I needed to begin writing PERL. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: It's My Choice
Review: As a professional consultant, I have to be ready to provide the client with a quality product. At times, a client will have a change of mind. That's what happened to me when I suddenly found myself requiring a working knowledge of PERL. I bought Deitel's PERL book, and was very impressed with their writing and teaching style. This book goes much more in depth than any of the "Teach Yourself..." books, and the text is clear. The CD that is included had everything I needed to begin writing PERL. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Perl How to and the Perl Training Course
Review: As a survivor of the IPO/ISP era, I have found perl to be
one of the best tools in my arsenal. From parsing
gigabytes of log files, report writing, sys admin tasks,
scripts, database interfaces, writing, using, and submitting
CPAN modules, security tasks, etc. And in all of this
work, the Deitel Perl books have been instrumental in
providing that necessary, intelligent resource for
assistance.
Rating: 
Summary: I¿m falling asleep
Review: Because of my school, I own 4 of these hideous beasts. While the books contain a rich assortment of information on their particular subjects, they can be verbose in the extreme. Additionally, they seem to be poorly organized as some other reviewers have mentioned. It is very difficult to pick up these books and stay interested for more than 5 minutes. I've had to purchase other books to actually learn the languages and utilize the Deitel books as references. Some people may find these books to be fine; I suspect we all learn differently. If you enjoy books that get right to the point and with better organization, look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Finally, a true all in one resource for Perl programmers
Review: Do you want to write Perl? Interface cgi with databases? Understand regular expressions? Maybe there is some basic question that you KNOW you should KNOW but even after perldoc and RTFM has failed you you were too ashamed to ask someone? After you read this, it won't leave the bag you take with you to work everyday.This book is clearly the very best Perl reference I have come across. After reading the famed O'Reilly Perl series (which you should also purchase for additional references), I was still searching for an all encompassing reference book (Basically because if you want hardcover print you will soon tire from lugging around the cookbook and the Llama book). Each function / method / module / package is clearly explained in enough detail to enable you to do something RELEVANT to what 99% of the people out there need to do, and FULLY understand what you are doing. For a bonus, each section has an example script ala the cookbook. If you have ever wanted to truly understand how to implement Perl this book is for you! I have never written a review before, but this book is really that good.
Rating:
Summary: Deitel books are the best
Review: Everyone that thought they knew anything about PERL told me to by the Llama and the Camel books (well respected O'Reilly books), which I did. I was disappointed with them as there was too much text and not enough programming examples. I then discovered there was a Deitel book on PERL. I should have checked for that first as I have two other Deitel books and love them. This was way better than the Llama or Camel book. There are many programming examples and they are all in the context of a complete working program or several html and PERL files. That is exactly what I was looking for - examples, working code, complete programs, and not too much talk. I think the Llama and Camel books are for people with more patience. I do think the Camel book would be a good resource for more advanced programming.
Rating:
Summary: It is not just an ordinary programming book!
Review: I am a computer system and network engineer for more than six years in Japan. I should state that I am not an experienced programmer in Perl or any other programming languages but I have some basic and limited knowledge in VB and Java. I have studied many computer text books but frankly saying the Perl How to Program book, is an excellent textbook as well as a handy reference book among the best books that I have studied so far. Not only it is well written but also the structure of the book is sorted and categorized in way that even non-native English spoken individuals can easily get the required understanding of programming language without trapping in ambiguous words and phrases. I have also bought the Learning Perl (Llama) but the Llama textbook is not a good textbook for the beginners who are eager to learn programming language from scratch, and the structure of the Llama for instance; the examples and the explanation of important subjects are insufficient, in addition there are some words and phrases which have been used in the Llama's main texts that I looked up in many English dictionaries and vocabulary sources but I have not found any description for them, the words such as "hoozistatic" and "fizzbin". Therefore I recommend the Perl How to Program to anyone who is eager to learn Perl programming language as well as the techniques of programming of any other programming languages from scratch!
Rating:
Summary: I smell a rat
Review: I am suspicous of all these wonderful reviews for what is essentially a by-the-numbers, cluttered text, which often explains in three pages what can be said in a paragraph. This book came out only a few weeks ago and it is over 1000 pages long, yet it has miraculously garnered 16 five-star reviews (so far). So many devoted readers? I doubt it. I smell a rat - perhaps from someone's Marketing Department.
Rating:
Summary: Better than Camel and Llama
Review: I bought the camel, llama, and perl cookbook and this book. This one actualy teaches you how to program perl! Well structured and the examples are relevant and useful. I have written three perl scripts by using examples from this book and the help of on-line forums that get some pretty niffty things done at work! Perl is easy to use (relatively) and powerful. I can do more with the "foreach" loop and "next if" statement than I can with 20 lines of shell scripting. A guy at work who is a little more advanced at perl than me was borrowing it all the time. He ordered it after a few days of that! Highly recommended!
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