Rating: 
Summary: Old Hat code, but still pretty useful
Review: I have pursued expertise with Perl in the same manner as I did with C, HTML, ASP and SQL: by looking at other people's code. This is still the best teacher, in my humble opinion. And on this mark alone, this book is worth it's price. I really haven't come across any code that I can't understand, and I certainly have benefited from reading through it all (one minor flaw: the author doesn't always explain what he's doing, although there's a LOT of code here, which is a good compensation). I MIGHT have paid the $50 for just the CD, it's THAT GOOD (and since the text, in my opinion is pretty much old hat or explained more clearly elsewhere). Much of my system admin work has been automated, thanks in part to this book.
Rating:
Summary: Essential desktop reference
Review: I have quite a few books on Perl, but most of them only warrant an occasional reference. This book, on the otherhand, is well-worn because I refer to it frequently. The examples are clear and concise. The book is well organized and flows nicely from topic to topic. If you are looking for one good book to get you started with Perl, and one that will grow with you, this is the book to get.
Rating:
Summary: Essential desktop reference
Review: I have quite a few books on Perl, but most of them only warrant an occasional reference. This book, on the otherhand, is well-worn because I refer to it frequently. The examples are clear and concise. The book is well organized and flows nicely from topic to topic. If you are looking for one good book to get you started with Perl, and one that will grow with you, this is the book to get.
Rating:
Summary: Superb Book
Review: I have the first edition ans just bought the 2nd edition. I know I can expect the same superb quality from the 2nd edition. I love my first edition and can't wait to get the 2nd into my hands. I've done alot of looking there is no perl book better, I mean none.
Rating:
Summary: Very useful book with great examples
Review: I have used many Perl books and the only one I've found that I grab as my first reference is this book. It has a short narrative on a subject with many good examples to reinforce all explanations.
Rating: 
Summary: Typos exist; Not enough advanced content
Review: I just bought this book based on a search on Amazon and reading all the other positive reviews. The only reason I want to use Perl is the Regular Expression feature.However, after I just started digging into the book (chapter 6 regular expressions) for 1 days and 26 pages so far, I already encountered 3 obvious mistakes: P.245 (! EXPR).....; the word 'not' is missing P.250 $text =~ tr/\r//d; should be tr/\\r/d P.251 In such case..../s.../S; should be \s and \S These are minor mistakes given the nature of Perl's syntax. But I wonder if other readers have noticed any typos throughout the book. For this reason, I take one star off. A more important reason that I knock off another star is that the book does not give further explanation about some advanced topics. It does a good job explaining simple things and I found sometimes it is not even necessary to give examples for. What really needs to be explained are the ones hard to understand, e.g. the author gives example on (?#comments) which is very straightforward. But offered no info on (?gtpattern) and (?imsx-imsx). I truly believe this book can be done in 600 pages instead of 1283 and explain things better. Overall, it's a good book, but I do not believe this could be the only Perl book you should buy. I also recommend O'Reilly's Learning Perl on Win32 Systems, which is concise and a good read.
Rating:
Summary: It's really a know-it-all Perl book
Review: I just started learning Perl and wanted a good reference that wouldn't talk to me on the level of Perl for Dummies but also wouldn't go so high that it was pointless. I wanted real-world examples and a lot of information on data structures. This book is amazing. I've had several rather obscure questions that it has answered perfectly and a rather large amount of confustion that the author cleared up nicely. He gives great examples and walks the reader through Perl from "Hello World" to a CGI database and interacting with windowing systems (Tk and Windows). Absolutely required for a serious library.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Resource for Experienced Perl Programmers
Review: I need code and I need it now! This book delivers. Explanations are concise with pointers to more details throughout the book. The "in depth" sections at the beginning of each chapter are extremely well done. Thanks for a great book!
Rating: 
Summary: Somehow I feel the old little book is more effective
Review: I own the "Perl Core Language Little Black Book" for sometime and I like it very much (5 star!). Then from the web I know there is a 2nd edition one from the same author. I bought it because it has twice as much as pages. Then I found it doesn't have twice as much the infomration. It becomes wordy, less effective if you want to use it as a reference. And the good "quick refernce page" is gone. I don't do CGI programming, so for me I found it is redundant. I'm still using the little black one and leave this heavy, expensive one idle. After all it is a great book.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite computer reference book
Review: I picked this book up at random. I had some experience at the time with Perl, and I've written in C/C++, bash, etc etc. I use linux as my operating system of choice, and work as a systems administrator at a medium-sized ISP. The Perl Black Book is hands down the best language book I've ever looked at. It's actually very remarkable. Every time I've needed a fast "How do I do..." answered, it's in the book. Mr. Holzner shows an amazing amount of foresight, and gives the impression that he has had exactly the same problem that I'm currently working on. Like the book says, an "indispensable problem solver."
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