Learning Perl, 5th Edition

In this smooth, carefully paced course, a leading Perl trainer teaches you to program in the language that threatens to make C, sed, awk, and the Unix shell obsolete for many tasks. This book is the `official` guide for both formal (classroom) and informal learning. It is fully accessible to the novice programmer.

User review
Great Book for Beginners
To go along with everyone else, this book is great for beginning to learn how to program in PERL. A must for everyone.

User review
Good, well-written introduction
I was pleased, as I often am with this publisher's books, with the clarity of the text. Within a few hours I was able to write my first useful perl scripts.

This book and a PC (with Perl downloaded, to permit you to execute & test your programs) make for a complete learning environment.

User review
Learning Perl
This book is a great place to start your programming adventure. It clearly lines out complex concepts in a way beginners can understand. I highly recommend this for anyone interested in systems administration or web development.

User review
Good fast shipping
Good fast shipping. Shipped in the state that was stated. I have not had much time with the book so i will not comment on the contents of the book.

User review
Start from the beginning and read every word
There could not ever be a better book for learning the Perl programming language than this one. The clarity of thought is unbelievable - the authors manage to provide a huge amount of detail while never going off on a tangent about exceptions to rules (something Perl, like English, is abundant with). If you want to get the basics of Perl under your fingertips in a *very* short amount of time, this is the book for you.

Let's face it - Perl can be a mess sometimes, and if you don't learn it from just the right angle, you'll find yourself knee-deep in a swamp. By choosing this book to learn from I effectively avoided all those pitfalls, and more importantly, adopted a clear way of using the language that has enabled me to write sophisticated, readable, even beautiful Perl code.

After some experience with the language I find it incredibly enjoyable to use, and when Perl is written well, it's easy to read someone else's code (to all you naysayers - yeah, Perl LETS you write bad code, but you don't have to!). This book was key to getting off on the right foot. I would highly recommend it to anyone who has any interest whatsoever in the language. Even if you only plan to write Perl for your own purposes, recreational or otherwise, this is the perfect beginner's tool. Buy it.