Perl 5 Complete

Rating:
Summary: Best, clearest, most enjoyable of all the Perl books
Review: This is by far the best of the many books on Perl, including the "classics." It is the best for installation instructions, best for multi-os coverage (the classics focus on Unix), it is exceptionally complete, and has great clarity in the explanations. This book takes everything that has made the classics so good, and has gone one step higher. The writing style is outstanding, and it is very rare to find any technical book that works so well for handling the beginner-to-accomplished range of the readers. One of the first things you will want to do after reading this book is look for every other book written by these authors.

Rating:
Summary: The best Perl 5 book ever written
Review: This is by far the best Perl5 book ever written. I have been puzzled by all those programming related books these days: with all advacned word processing techniques, can they "pretty-print" example programs so that readers may get the idea very quickly ? Who has enough time to go through all those examples line by line ? First, this book goes beyond such pretty-printing. Important parts in the programs are well-marked, additional explanations are typed in small cases and pointing to the appropriate places using arrows, related parts are connected using lines and arrows. When you look at the examples in the book, I don't need to go through line by line. The concepts are immediately coming through my eyes to the brain, by looking at the example. Second, the example programs are as good as in many other authoritive books (like Perl5 Cookbook). And there are so many examples in the book. Finally, the structure of the book is one of the best. One minor problem would be there are as many typos as in Perl5 Cookbook. But unlike in Perl5 Cookbook, I can ignore such minor typos, since I already got the concepts of the example program by simply looking at it. In summary, if you need only one book for perl, this is one. Also, I would recommend this book to anyone who has been embarrassed by Perl. An extremely user-friendly book for anyone who has any programming experience (ie. this book does NOT teach the basics of programming).

Rating:
Summary: Hard to find information
Review: This is one of the most unorganized books I have ever read. I just started learning Perl, and I used this book because it was available in the library. I read up to chapter 10. One big problem with this book is that the Index is very short and the book is huge, so most of the time I cannot find a reference pointer to the subject I am interested. The index is basically useless. So I have wasted a lot of time trying to find information about a specific subject by browsing the book until I found a relevant heading. There seems to be tones of information in this book but, the organization is terrible; it is as if they had just dumped a lot of scattered information into one book, without beeing concerned about the logical flow. After chapter 10, the topics are very advanced, but they are not introduced properly. There is the assumption that you already know a lot of object oriented programming. I have given up on this book and threw it away. I never write book reviews but I felt compelled to do it today, because this book just got to my nerves by wasting so much of my time. I hope you don't waste your money on this book.

Rating:
Summary: I agree it's an excellent book, but....
Review: Yes, it's quite a good book for beginners to advanced Perl hackers. But this first edition should have been published so hastly. There are errors as many as 3 times in a page! Sometimes the error is so critical that it should make beginners frustrated easily. Be cautious!