The book is well written and useful. I've a need to write scripts and
do some coding in my job. I feel that this book will help me get past some of the disconnects, in my way of thinking, when it comes to programming. As a Hardware designer I can understand a piece of logic. But I've often struggled with interpretting or writing my own code.

This was the first book that I used to learn Perl. I would agree with some of the other reviews that it would be tough to learn Perl with just this book. I ended up filling in some of the gaps with "Learning Perl" by Randal L. Schwartz.

The book is an overview of the language and its different uses. It uses a lot of small snippets of useful code for examples which is great when you need that snippet. However, chapter 4 is the only example of a fully written out program and is only used to illustrate what a program would look like. You will not find a fully written out solutions or examples here.

This, in addition to its spartan coverage on certain advance topics, can make parts of the book not very useful and confusing. Do not get this book if you want to learn about the following subjects as it covers them only briefly:
-Object-oriented programming with Perl
-Perl modules
-CGI scripting or other involved server-side scripting
-XML processing

I basically use Perl for data munging and not for web purposes. I generally need to write a quick and dirty script to munge some legacy data. To this end this book is valuable to me. It is a good reference for remembering the quirky Perl syntax. I keep it handy when I need to remember how to write a section of code. I use it as a mini "Perl Cookbook".
I would give it:
4 stars for teaching the basic language
3 stars for coverage of advance material
5 stars for basic reference of regular expressions and data structures.

I BOUGHT PERL FOR MY GRANDSON AND HE WAS VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS BOOK. AMAZON WAS VERY CHEAP COMPARED TO OTHER COMPANIES. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE BETTY WEEKS

This was my first book for PERL and let me tell you, it was the worst written piece of garbage I have ever read. This book lives up to its name - it makes you feel like a dumbass. This is due to the authors approach in showing you PERL. Rather than breaking down the structure and powerful commands (telling you what they are and what they can do), he instead takes the approach of just showing you countless examples of complex code that the reader hasn't been properly introduced to. To show an example of how to use the chomp command, he buries it within examples along with other commands that he hasn't even talked about. That is confusing for a beginner. If you knew how to read his code, you wouldn't need this book in the first place.

I recommend going with O'Reilly books instead. They tend to take a systematic approach, discussing and breaking down the structure and use of specific commands and then showing you small examples using only the code and commands they already discussed. Believe me, it is better than dummies approach of making you try to read a 50 line code example to see what a specific command can do.

Stay away from the dumies series. All these books do is make you feel like a dummy.

This was my first book for PERL and let me tell you, it was the worst written piece of garbage I have ever read. This book lives up to its name - it makes you feel like a dumbass. This is due to the authors approach in showing you PERL. Rather than breaking down the structure and powerful commands (telling you what they are and what they can do), he instead takes the approach of just showing you countless examples of complex code that the reader hasn't been properly introduced to. To show an example of how to use the chomp command, he buries it within examples along with other commands that he hasn't even talked about. That is confusing for a beginner. If you knew how to read his code, you wouldn't need this book in the first place.

I recommend going with O'Reilly books instead. They tend to take a systematic approach, discussing and breaking down the structure and use of specific commands and then showing you small examples using only the code and commands they already discussed. Believe me, it is better than dummies approach of making you try to read a 50 line code example to see what a specific command can do.

Stay away from the dumies series. All these books do is make you feel like a dummy.

I bought this book to 'fill in the gaps' after several years of perl programming. It is providing valuable insights into new areas as well as being easy to learn from. This is particularly true in the area of databases and what different language versions can do. Highly recommend.

I happened on this book while cleaning out an ex-employees cube. I gave it a speed read out of curiosity.

This book is a "baby steps" book. Don't look at it to learn how to write scripts for your job. It is a beginners book. Especially if you have never programmed and you have recently heard about Perl.

The scripts you will find in here are very very basic and not really usable for "serious" needs.

As I mentioned this is a "baby steps" book, there are some sections which I thought might be overkill and could cause confusion.

Part IV (the info link on the book shows what's there) probably could have been left for another book or simply left as a section for "stuff to look at."

The same for the section on Perl and CGI. There is far too much to do it justice in one chapter of a beginner book.

I was happy to see map and glob mentioned. They are two commands that are often overlooked and very very useful.

Again if you are new to programming and Perl then this book is ok for a light weight introduction.

If you understand programming concepts and want to learn Perl, I would suggest the Learning Perl book from O'Reilly or Beginning Perl by Simon Cozens over this book.

This book provides a decent overview of Perl's capabilities, but has one fatal flaw...it doesn't really get you programming. I read the whole book, and got to the end having some ideas about the kinds of things Perl can do, but not really knowing how to do any of them. Get Perl by Example, instead. It gets you writing code from the get go, and goes farther in giving you an understanding of how Perl works.

This book was not up to the 'Dummies' standard, in my opinion. Perhaps because PERL users are so diverse that hitting on all the various wants would take too long? I found this book lacking in substance. That is, you could finish this book with no real feeling of competence in basic PERL scripting. I strongly suggest "Learning PERL" instead.

This book seems to follow the pattern of most Dummies books I've read...give a good overview of the major considerations of the topic at hand, provide a few examples to help give the reader a feeling of empowerment, and indicate that there is much more to learn.

I came to this book needing to learn perl well enough to write some simple text modification programs for work. While this book does not replace a semester-long university course on the language (which is what I'm used to), it does give the reader enough information to jump in and start writing some simple perl programs...if your comfortable with the OS you're dealing with and if perl is already installed (I'm not sure I really could have accomplished those tasks with only the knowlege from this book).

I guess my take on this book and other Dummies books are like those infamous Cliff Notes from high school...simply reading these books won't make you an expert, but they can give valuable insight and pointers that you might not easily gain on your own. As an additional tool coupled with a little bit of programming experience and the provided perl documentation, Perl for Dummies has helped me get up to speed quickly and complete several important projects...which I don't think I would have been able to do otherwise.

My definition of a good dummies book is one that answers questions rather than raise more of them. I've read up to chapter 5 so far in this book and already my mind is swarming with dozens of questions. And it's frustrating knowing that they aren't answered, or at least, not at this point.

I'm reading this book from cover to cover - I'm not using it as a reference. I really want to learn Perl. Therefore, I was hoping to truly understand WHY certain things are the way they are in this language... not just that "this does that." That's only 1/2 of the battle in programming. We have to know how these functions/variables relate to each other. That's what programming is all about - relations... but relationships aren't defined clearly (so far) in this book.

For example, the author goes through 2 examples of perl programs in Chapter 4. He illustrates what each part of the script does, but this is only partially satisfactory. Half of the displayed functions are definitions, instead of explanations. I found myself asking "Okay, so why is that part important? How does it relate to the other parts? Why does that need to be included? The chomp variable? Why include that here? Sure, I know what it DOES, but why include it here? Which variables are native to Perl and which aren't?" Many, many questions.

It feels like Chapter 4 belongs towards the end of the book, after we understand all of the basic functions/variables, etc. I skimmed through the book and found answers to questions I had at the beginning - which isn't very efficient.

I understand why something is important about 50% of the time with Perl for Dummies. The other 50% is spent looking in other chapters for answers, doing mental gymnastics in my head, or just moving on, hoping it will be explained in the next page or so.

Perhaps he does explain it, but not enough to my satisfaction. Or maybe it's all cleaned up in later chapters. It sounds like he wrote this assuming we would be able to figure out any missing parts. The book needs more clarity. I'm left more confused than enlightened.

It was only after applying a bit of my own computer know-how that I finally got a script to work - frustrating when the author doesn't make it clear you can make paths to the files you want to use Perl on. I eventually figured it out... but aren't Dummies books supposed to explain these things?

I'm not reviewing this book out of ignorance or disrespect for the author's knowledge and experience. He obviously knows what he is doing. I've programmed in Java before and it's easy to see the similarities. I'm also an experienced web developer.

I just wonder how I could be scratching my head so many times when this book is supposed adapt to the fact that I am a dummy. Good start, but gets confusing quickly.

If the book gets any better as I read, I will re-review it and adjust its rating accordingly.

This really is the best book I know of for learning Perl, and I say that as someone who owns a very large pile of books on the subject. I first bought it when I started a year of full-time Perl programming, and it was the book that let me get up and running. Some years later, I *still* go back to it occasionally--there are some things that it just explains better than other books do. (In particular, it does a good job with some of the occasional dark corners of dereferencing arrays in complex data structures. If you know what that means: there's some weird syntax to this that this book gives very clear examples of. If you don't know what that means: trust me when I say that this book will tell you how to handle it without requiring that you completely understand why it's hard first, and that's a VERY good thing.)

If you're already an experienced programmer, you'll do fine reading the introductory material in Larry Wall et al.'s "Programming Perl," but whether you're an old hat at hacking or not, you'll get plenty out of this book. When you're up to speed, your next book should probably be "Programming Perl" or Nigel Chapman's "Perl: The Programmer's Companion."

This book would get you programming in perl in no-time !
It is amazing how easy this book makes even the more advanced features of Perl. WOW !
Perl is a wonderful and easy programming language for dealing with files, small and medium communication programs, pathches for other software and so on.
This book gives you a great start in that field, and it's fun !

Having been almost completely stumped by trying to learn Perl using the camel, I was desperate to find something that would make it a bit easier to get started. This book was just what the doctor ordered. True, there were no excercises, but I could dream up my own without much difficulty. I would have given this book the full five stars as a starter for Perl (at least for someone like me who has programming experience; non-Perl, non-C, but still) if it hadn't been for one thing: Doesn't anyone proofread these things? It's bad enough when there are irritating t7pos in the text describing things, but when the little sample code snippets have errors in them, that's really bad.

That said, the book made me realize at the first glance when the code was bad, so it definitely taught me something. And now I feel ready to go back to the camel again.

Warning: Do not purchase this book if you want to Learn PERL. This book has no exercises.

This book is a very good introduction to Perl. If your goal is to program CGI scripts, however, you will need an additional book. The chapter on CGI uses incomplete examples which cannot be run as-is. This is a change from the previous chapters which provided working examples. To parse incoming data, the author says you should use a perl module called CGI_Lite. But he doesn't tell where to get it, how to install it, or how to set it up and use it. That's not too helpful, especially for a beginners book. You'll need to know some Perl before diving into CGI programming, and this book can give you that base knowledge. Just don't expect it to give you everything you'll need to know to get cgi scripts up and running.