Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book by far is the best beginner programming book I have ever read...better than those I read about C++ or JAVA which tend to get too complicated too fast and extremely fussy.The book is easy to read and follow and does exactly what it intends to deliver - to teach Perl to beginners. To a seasoned Perl professional, this book is too easy. But to a student trying to learn the language, so far this book is the ONLY ONE available to offer some sort of structured learning experience that I didn't find in "Programming Perl" or any other Perl books out there. The authors did an excellent job at describing the fundamentals of Perl language. The section on installing Active Perl on windows is extremely helpful. No other programming books would bother go into such details or try to be real supportive. From reading this book, I begin to appreciate the power of Perl and nice folks behind it. This book actually teaches Perl. GREAT BOOK, THANKS GUYS!!! A University Student
Rating: 
Summary: Not for the beginner
Review: This book is not really for the beginning Perl learner. I found that Mr. Cozens did not give clear explanations of his code. There was no explanation of how to make your shell script an executable. This books needs more work as much as I do on my perl!
Rating:
Summary: Poor English and too simplistic
Review: This book is TOO simple, TOO verbose, it took the author about 30 pages before he even got to the "hello world". I mean this guy goes all the way back to the basics, explaining how a zero in binary is when the electricity is off, and a one is when its on. Come on, I know this is a beginning book, but well..., come on. Here's some of what you cover in 35 (gruelingly long) pages: * What is programming anyway? What does it mean to program? * What happens to the program that we write? * How do we structure programs and make them easy to understand? * How do computers see numbers and letters? * How do we find and eliminate errors in our programs? Plus his english is poor, and most of it escaped editing. Give yourself some credit for being smart enough to read something more concise. Hand holding is nice, but this is too dumb for the Dummy series!
Rating: 
Summary: Essential for starters.
Review: This is a must book, if you want to start Perl programming. It explains how to start writing perl in both unix/linux and windows. Also perl installation is explained in detail. This book is not just another CGI book that explains more cgi and less perl, it explains the core language and also lists the scope of perl-programming in the real-world, in the authors word "...cant' grow upwards, we can grow outwards". Offcourse Perl-CGI is emphasised only in one chapter. Bottomline, - read this book if you are a starter and dont' just want to learn writing cgi scripts , but learn some real perl programming.
Rating:
Summary: The best book for learning Perl
Review: This is the best beginner's book for Perl I have touched so far. In comparison to Learning Perl and Programming Perl, Simon Cozens goes step by step and concept by concept with enough in-depth examples. By reading the book, I somehow also got encouraged to modify the examples by myself and see what happens when we change certain lines of code. Indeed "There is more than one way to do it!"
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and Well Written
Review: Very comprehensive and well written. Where as most Perl books fall down in major areas, this book hits the right balance between technical details and ease of reading. Certainly the best beginners Perl book I've read.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm a Perl Beginner / Intermediate - Pretty Good Book
Review: Where I coming from:
I learned programming? almost 15 years ago with the BASIC Programming Language. About a year ago I learned HTML then CGI using PERL of course. I bought this book as step towards learning PERL better. I read about 80% of the book in detail. My feelings about Learning Programming:
Programming even in PERL is a huge undertaking. Books make it seem simple to learn PERL or other languages esp the learn JAVA in 24 hrs etc. After studying PERL for a year I re-read sections in the book and now realize how simplistic it is compared to more advanced coding like using modules and OOP etc. You won't go wrong with this book it is much more suited to a newbie than O'Reily Programming Perl that people buy thinking they can learn perl from it. Summary:
All in all the author does a decent job of teaching the beginner. My only complain is that in some spots the author makes a huge leap without explaining how to get there step by step. This can cause you to waste a lot of time trying to figure some stuff out on your own. To learn from this or any other book you will have to spend a LOT of time coding!!! good luck.
Rating:
Summary: Fluent, Easy to Understand, Idiomatic
Review: Whereas many books appear to assume too much knowledge, this book gently confirms essential computing concepts, so as to give the reader a solid foundation from which to learn. The book encourages good habits right from the start with encouraging readers to use -w and often use strict;. The book is focused, and doesn't appear to be trying to do all jobs at once - it is meant as a beginners book and fufills that role perfectly, as well as giving more than enough information on where to get further help.
Rating:
Summary: Does the job
Review: Yes the book has a few typos, but overall is perhaps the best begining perl book on the market. It helps if you are familiar with programming logic (loops,desicions) and structured programming. This book takes you through every aspect of perl in well strutcured chapters. Some of the explanation of code are rather child like....but then again this is supposed to be a book for beginers. On top of core perl, the book has a pretty good chapter on making use of perl for CGI, and a great intro chapter to writting highly portable BDM(flat file databases)programs and DBI-an abstract relational database interface. Plus complete installation and set up intructions for MySQL. Ive read many computer books, and many books on perl, the bottom line is this is the best book out there for begining perl. I give it only four stars because of the typos, lack of CD with source code, and I rarely give anything a perfect score. If you want to learn Perl and how to use it for CGI and database access then buy this book!
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