Perl

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Summary: Hacking PERL scripts? This book is for you.
Review: If you are not a heavily experienced PERL programmer and enjoy hacking other people's scripts, this is an excellent companion. This book makes it easy to look up just about any perl syntax you can dream up and it also gives examples of how the function is called. Not very usefull if you want to look up a function and you don't know what it is called, but if you want to understand whats going on behind the perl curtain I would recommend that you get this. Besides, it will look good on your shelf. Trust me.

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Summary: An essential desktop Perl reference
Review: The size of this book is immense, but it matches the available content. If you want to know the details of a Perl feature or extensions it's all contained in this book. The layout is a little odd, and you really need to know Perl to make the best use of the book. It's already saved me a few hours trawling through the Perl documentation - the book pointed me in the right direction on a script that wasn't working correctly. The inclusion of information on complex data structures and databases also helped me solve a few problems I'd had with another script that wasn't displaying information properly.

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Summary: Everything you should need to know to program in Perl
Review: When my publisher asked me to write a Complete Reference title I was somewhat taken aback. The first computer book I ever bought was Unix: The Complete Reference whilst at college and it remained a core part of my book shelf for many years.
When you approach a book like this you have to look at each section logically. The Complete Reference series means just that, everything you need to know about a topic and more. Perl is a huge language and to try and describe everything about Perl in a single volume is impossible. Instead, I took the focus of covering everything that I have ever had to use within Perl, along with some additional entries suggested by other Perl programmers and based on the feedback from my Perl Annotated Archives title.
The format of the book is not as a training guide - if you don't know Perl, using this book to learn it will be hard. Instead, Perl: TCR covers each of the core elements of the language, variables, statements, operators, functions and so on as a natural progression through the book. The further you get into the book the more detailed and expansive the information supplied.
The book is also an attempt to provide more than just snippets of code. Instead each chapter provides one or more complete solutions to specific problems.
By the time we reach the end of the book, but before the Appendices I cover one of my own personal bugbears. Perl is not, despite what many people think, a Unix programming language. Perl is available on Windows, MacOS and many platforms in addition to it's Unix roots. To aid in the process of developing cross platform applications information is given on how best to approach the problem of cross platform development, in addition to details on the additional support offered on the Windows and MacOS platforms for Perl development.