programming language

The book is definetely written for those who at least have some (or maybe a little more than just "some") programming background, and willing to learn Perl from the author of the language.

I read the first edition of the book, which was about 200 pages, or something in that range, which filled my mind with nothing but questions. Current edition, however, could answer to all of those questions (well, almost). Of course, to make it answer them I had to re-read the book four times. But none of the books I currently own (and I own quite a few) could've taken me to the innards of the language so deep no matter how many times I had read them. So the book is of value.

The Camel book, especially, does a great job on Regular Expressions and pattern matching. If you want to learn RegEx of perl in very details, you definitely need listen to the author of Perl. "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl is also a good choise, but doesn't include the latest updates.

Formats aren't covered very well though. So you might consider "The Lama book" for that ("Learning Perl"). Still, none of the books can tell you about the innards of the Perl in so much detail overall than "Programming Perl".

OOP is also toched upon in the book. Since purpose of the author is not to preach you OO lingo (but plain Perl), you'll treat that part just as an intorduction to OOP and consider "Object Oriented perl" by Damian Convey as the next text book.

I found chpater 14, "Tied variables" very helpfull though. It might remind you of DBM/Berkley DB, through the syntax

tie my %db, 'AnyDBM_File', 'my_file', O_CREAT|O_RDWR, 0664;

but unfortunately it's not about DBM at all. It is about how the "tie" function works, and teaches you how to create your own classes for implementing with "tie". After that chapter, I even had to update some of my classes and saved lots of time for their updates.

"Compiling", chapter 18 ,is a must read chapter for those who "live & breath" with Perl (like me, may be ?).

I don't want you to buy the book unless you have a good understanding of Programming or/and have knowledge of some programming languages. Otherwise, it won't help at all.

If your purpose is just to get started with Web applications, go for "CGI progamming 101" by Jacqueline Hamilton. It is a good start. But if you want to go even deeper, "Learning Perl" and "Perl Coookbook" is the next choise. Keep the "The Camel" book as the next (but definitely, not the last).

Hola! from the most wired dormatory in America,

I thought my CS friends were crazy. Fell asleep to Chapter 2. I dare not even look at the alphabetical Ch. 3 and 7. How can this be the famous tutorial? The problem is simple: it's a bible. Quite literally. No nonsense details, and lots of it. Don't give up. The authors thought of you. There's hope.

Heed Ch. 2's subtle suggestion as to how you might want to use the book as a tutorial:

A. The >contexts< in which Perl language features, basic Perl functions, and core Perl libraries will be used are not in Ch. 2, 3, or 7--Ch. 4-6 reveals all. Look there instead. Code examples and real world use are simply saved for later. This is a great way to preserve the succinct nature of a deskside reference.

B. Read it backwards! Skim pass Ch. 2, 3, and 7 if you have some programming background. Refer to them as you stumble across strange terrain during your careful study of Ch 4-6. Read this way the reference becomes a tender tutorial. Your fingers will also become very familiar with the whereabouts of each toy in this treasure chest.

This book is a pearl. So is the community.

The reference sections were great -- I read them end to end. This book would be great if that's what you were buying it for. If you've already been lightly introduced to Perl, (and you can find what you are looking for without a decent index), you wouldn't do badly with this book.

However, even if you know a broad range of other computer languages, Perl is full of painfully implicit semantics and esoteric details, so a few chapters of introduction are important. The book had those chapters, to it's credit, but the writing in them was wandering and weakly structured, and not so well edited -- somewhat like the Perl language itself? I had heard Perl criticized as a collection of many individually "neat" features and shortcuts, lacking overall design and simplifying consistency. The book seemed to reinforce that feeling.

With so many features, you would have expected some extra effort to have been invested into a decent index. Unfortunately, I have often found it rather hard to find what I'm looking for.

The layout scheme conforms to the extremely flat OReilly Books standard (e.g. subsection levels deliniated by subtle font size differences in headings). That standard looks distinctly like old LaTeX output, or something similarly invented before graphical layout tools.

In summary, even if you know lots of languages, don't buy this book expecting an easy ride into the world of Perl, based on the names "Larry Wall" or "OReilly".