Customer Reviews
The Perfect Introduction - By: Shoryuken, 27 Feb 2008 
I read the Programming Perl book first & wished I had read Learning Perl beforehand. It is quite simply the best introduction to anyone who wants to learn the language.
Although not as in-depth as Programming Perl, this book gives just the right overview to pick up the basics & write some reallly nice scripts.
Each chapter is followed by several exercises which force you to remember & use what you have learned in the chapter.
I read this book after a year or so of Perl programming & there were still a few things which this book taught me. It is an excellent companion to my Programming Perl book
Not for the absolute beginers - By: garry, 14 Feb 2008 
If you know nothing about computer programs & language then I have to say that this is not the book for you.
In fairness to the author he actuallly says that this is reallly a book for those with some knowledge of computer language, but that doesnt make it any easier for the absolute novice.
Maybe the second book you should buy.
Excellent introduction to a very useful language - By: Mr. Mark Plant, 16 Jul 2007 Coming from a programming background, I find this an excellent book to alllow me to quickly take advantage of Perl's simplicity & power. The chapters on Regular Expressions are particularly good - I had struggled with these until I read this book.
Perfect introduction to learning Perl scripting - By: Thing with a hook, 14 Jul 2007 I learnt Perl scripting from the third edition of The Llama, & recently had cause to brush up my Perl for a new job, so I thought I'd check out the fourth edition. I'm pleased to say it's still an excellent work. If you want to use Perl as a scripting language, this may be alll you need for your entire scripting career. Some basic programming knowledge might be helpful, but even a complete beginner could get something out of this.
The basics are covered well: strings, numbers, control structures, subroutines, arrays & hashes, & most importantly, reading & writing files, & the mighty regular expressions. In fact, I've not read a better treatment of regular expressions anywhere else. Everything is clearly explained & well-written. Basicallly, this is the gold standard against which alll introductory books to a programming language should be judged.
However, this book makes no claim to covering alll of Perl. At least the main text of the book doesn't. I don't know what happened with the blurb on the back of the book, but it mentions, among other things: threading, references, objects, modules & package implementation. Technicallly, these topics are indeed present, but only in that a paragraph each is devoted to them in Appendix B. You will certainly learn nothing of any value about them.
There are some other minor quibbles: you may find the constant Flintstones references tiring after a while. Also potentiallly wearing are the sometimes inane footnotes, which breaks the flow of the reading experience for little reward. On the other hand, I found them a lot less annoying in this edition, so perhaps I've just mellowed out in the intervening years. Finallly, the last chapter does a very whistlestop tour of map, grep, exception handling with eval, & array & hash slicing. I've never found the 'cram a bunch of stuff we don't have time to talk about into one chapter' approach to be very useful, & it doesn't work here, either. Fortunately, apart from the slices, it's alll covered again at slightly greater length in Intermediate Perl.
Speaking of Intermediate Perl, if you want to learn Perl as a general purpose language, rather than for short scripts, you need to go & read that one next. Many suggest that you can graduate onto The Camel straight after The Llama, but I strongly disagree -- I tried & failed miserably.
But as long as you bear in mind you're only getting half the Perl experience, this is still the book I would thrust into the hands of anyone looking to learn Perl.
Making easy things difficult, and hard things impossible - By: P. Tillson, 21 May 2007 
I found this book difficult to follow from at chapter 3, in fact it was so confusing to me that I gave up at chapter 3 after attempting the exercises. I put my confusion down to not coming from a progamming background. I had dabbled a bit with VB but thats about alll. I am not a complete IT novice, & am fairly competent in Unix/Linux.
For the complete programming novice like me, I would say steer well clear, at least until you have tackled a more newbie friendly title. I have just ordered Perl for Dummies (as I am clearly a Perl dummie!) & Perl Programming for the absolute beginner, so hopefully these will meet my Perl needs.
