The Perl 5 Programmer's Reference

Rating:
Summary: Great reference
Review: Loved the book! Amazed at a couple of the other reviews here, especially those talking about an index. The book itself is an index - each entry alphabetically listed and includes "See Also" sections to point you to related syntax. Has good cross reference section too. Not a book for those wanting to learn Perl, but definitely a good and pure reference.

Rating:
Summary: no index, no concept discussion, incomplete specification
Review: That was enough to convince me to return it

Rating:
Summary: Good reference but could be better
Review: The commands and things are in order as you would expect in a reference book but it has no index. Every non-fiction book, except a dictionary, should have a good index. I'm also disappointed by missing items, like =~.

Rating:
Summary: Book has factual errors and important omissions
Review: This supplements prior review. Description of ARGV on page 328 is in error. $ARGV[0]is first argument on command line NOT the script name (as it would be in C). Also, I can find no description on use of backquotes in this manual. It looks nice, is generally well-organized, but incomplete and inaccurate.

Rating:
Summary: Incomplete as a "complete" reference
Review: When I buy and read "The Ultimate Resource for Perl 5 Professionals! The most complete, concise reference available...", I expect the kind of detail that eliminates the need for additional Perl 5 reference books and the need to exhaustively test exactly how functions work. One simple example: gmtime takes a single date/time argument and returns 9 individual date and time variables, but this book doesn't provide details about the values returned in those variables. Is the month represented as 1 to 12, or 0 to 11, for example? It's up to the reader of the book to figure that out. Not hard to do, but it greatly diminishes the value of the book when that level of detail is not provided.