If you are programming in Perl, this is a required book to have. It is the definitive manual on the language written by the author of the language, yet is very readable.

This informal "bible" of Perl programming is an easy read for experienced programmers AND has a great index for reference. Walls and Christiansen team up well for us advanced beginners by welcoming us into the Club and giving us the straight scoop in a coherent structure.

This is the 4th book that I have purchased on the subject, and this book really should have been the first book that I bought. It breaks down many of the Perl concepts into simple-plan-english that are easy to understand. It provides more information on the principles that are briefly touched upon in the other books. I have only began reading/referencing this book; therefore I can only give it a 3 star rating at this point. As the book states, Perl is an ever-evolving language that would be hard to totally document in a single book, but I can appreciate the extents that the contributors have made to this publication.

It is difficult to study perl using only this book.
Learning perl is the best way to study perl.
This book should be a reference of perl.

And there are many examples on the Net.
You can use these examples to modify for your purpose.
Sometimes, you should study how to debbug perl.

I decided to buy this book because I needed to learn Perl after having programmed in several other languages for my new job.

I was looking for a reference guide that pretty much outlined EVERYTHING that Perl can do. Proper syntax, short cuts, how to properly go about writing code in this language, how do write certain operations... etc

I was also looking for something that could be authoritative and set the STANDARD for how something should and should not be done... and not be written by some sloppy idiot who thinks he knows what he's doing.

And last but not least, I was looking for something that was funny and entertaining to read and not a dry boring textbook.

This book, as others call it "The Camel" or "The Camel Book", meets all those criteria. This is truly the BEST book on Perl out there, written by the inventor himself, Larry Wall, and some of his Perl-guru buddies. If you came to this page wondering if this is the book to get to learn to program in Perl, look no further.

Absolutely 5 stars on this one. And trust me, this book is pretty funny. It's almost as if it's written by your best friend or your roommate who you drink beers with, yet still goes into amazingly tidy and meticulous detail on how to do things properly. I couldn't have asked for a better book.
If you're like me and learning this for work, see if your boss will even buy it for the office. Mine did!

I hope you enjoyed my review. I've gone from knowing NOTHING about Perl to writing some pretty robust scripts in a matter of a few short weeks and I truly LOVE writing stuff in Perl because it is very easy once you get the idea of how the syntax is written in your brain. Anyways, I felt I had to share my experience with you so you can do the same. Enjoy.

PS: There is a correction I've found since there have been a few newer releases than the Perl 5 explained in this book. (As I write this, I'm using Perl 5.8.8).

pg. 513: At the very bottom should tell you that the period character "." will display the current position of the debugger.

pg. 514: The w command no longer lists a window of lines around your position. It is now the "v" as in [v]iew.

I program in C# almost exclusively. However, I needed some serious regex power and this kind of power can only be handled/performed with Perl.

Well, I have been learning Perl now for about 2 months and this book is uber invaluable to my book collection and has made it very easy to pick the syntax up quickly.

-- smerkdaddy

I would not recommend this book upfront if you don't know any Perl. Read up Beginning Perl by Simon Cozens and feel around a bit. Then pick this book up and put in the effort and you WILL appreciate the power, truth and beauty about PERL.

It is not a light read... certainly wasn't for me. But at the end of it, the effort was so worth it. The book will give you several Aha moments and by the end of it, thou shalt be rewarded!!

This contains a lot of useful information and examples which go above and beyond the "basics" found in the extensive Perl man-pages.

A really quite good introduction and how-to guide to the whacky and very cool and useful beast that is the Perl programming language. It certainly helped me when I decided to pick up the language for some of the useful internet programming tricks that it had. A book I would definitely recommend as a purchase. Not too many you could say that about currently.

Programming Perl, also known as "The Camel Book," is the ultimate reference guide, written by the creator of Perl, Larry Wall. As one might expect, this guide covers every nook and cranny of the Perl programming language. It's greatest strength is also it's greatest weakness: useful nuggets of information are buried everywhere throughout the text. This is a strength in that, when looking up a particular topic, you'll often stumble upon a useful morsel of information. It's a weakness in that you have to slog through often dry reading to find these hidden gems.

It should be noted that this book assumes a working knowledge of Unix, in addition to some previous programming experience. If you are new to programming, or just new to Perl, you should check out Learning Perl, Fourth Edition instead. It is a much easier read, and ranks in my mind among the most well written technical books. Programming Perl makes for a great second book, as well as a desktop reference.

Perl seems capable of evoking both rapturous adoration and abject disgust from those who are exposed to it. If your feelings are closer to the former than the latter, well, you probably own this book already, and you love it.

After all, The Camel consists of the God of Perl and two Perl demigods writing the definitive reference about Perl from top to bottom. What's not to love? In particular, if you've ever heard Larry Wall give a talk, you'll be able to spot his contributions: droll, parenthetical and punning.

For those of us who just like Perl (or even just have to work with it), it's not quite as essential as you might have been led to believe. In part this might be because the third edition is getting on a bit, and plenty of other good Perl books have emerged in the intervening time. And in part, it's because definitive tomes such as this one by definition contain large chunks that you don't need, where you'll spend most of your time just nodding and thinking 'yep, I already know that'.

But of course, there's always a few bits you didn't know, and that's where The Camel comes in handy. The first part of the book, which goes over the core of the language, is a must read in this respect. To be honest, I didn't find the explanations to be quite as cogent as what can be found elsewhere (e.g. Perl Best Practices or Advanced Perl Programming), but it's all in one place here.

In addition, beyond the core language, lots of other material is present, including: threading, details on Perl's internals, and a long list of Perl idioms and dos and don'ts. There's also the reference section, which covers the built in functions, and briefly outlines what's in the standard packages that come with Perl, which is also helpful, although in most cases I expect an internet search (or the perl man pages) is just as fast, and in the case of the standard library, provides more information.

On the one hand, I think you can get by without owning this. On the other you will not regret buying this book -- Perl has enough quirks that it's nice to have The Camel close to hand. Nice, but not essential.

The book is written by the creators of Perl, but the truth is that the book is not nearly as good as it's cracked up to be. It suffers from the "fish describing water" syndrome, where the authors find it hard to know what to talk about and what not to talk about.

The book definitely is useful, but it's not as useful as a book written by more skillful technical writers would have been. It's very "ivory towers" and it badly needs more simple example scripts rather than "head in the clouds" discussions.

Unfortunately a lot of people who want to be "macho" about computers will say that this book is much easier to understand and useable than it really is - they'd probably tell you about how wonderful the emperor's new clothes are too.

It's not a bad book, and it's definitely useful, but I'd recommend borrowing a copy of this book to have a good look at it before buying it.

I haven't actually used this book in some time, but never got the last copy back from the person who borrowed it off my bookshelf. When it did see use, it was mostly to quickly look up things in the back.

Larry Wall (the father of Perl) is a genius. This book is essential for anyone who loves PERL. You might also want to consider "PERL: Essential Programs for Your Survival at Work" by Larry L. Smith.

Larry Wall (the father of Perl) is a genius. This book is essential for anyone who loves PERL. You might also want to consider "PERL: Essential Programs for Your Survival at Work" by Larry L. Smith.

This book is _the_ book to get when you want to get serious about Perl.
If you want to simply get to know Perl and write a few scripts, get "Learning Perl" and that'll teach you what you need to know, plus a few interesting tips here and there that you wouldn't catch yourself.
When you want to actually program in Perl and do the serious work, it's worth it to have access to this book. All the idiosyncrasies are given and you will develop a very indepth understanding of Perl... and once you have that, you can get a huge load done with Perl.

The book is well edited and has obviously evloved since its first edition to meet the needs of its readers, based on their feedback.

Unfortunately, it teaches you things inside out (and to be fair, the authors do actually tell you this about two chapters in).

They briefly mention/cite concepts in the early chapters which they then don't delve into until later chapters (e.g. they discuss symbol references early on, in regard to operators available in the language, without any introduction as to what a symbol reference is -- and I was left pretty confused sat 30k feet in the sky. I had to hop around the book to find out what was going on).

I am someone that likes to know what's going on every step of the way, where plausible, but I find it very difficult not to stop when I encounter a situation like this and hit Google to work out what they're referring to.

If you like a more methodical approach to learning a new language, try Learning Perl by Schwart et al.

Having said that, everything they do decide to drill down into is well described and becomes absorbed into your memory a lot quicker than most other texts.

I am not new to programming, but was new to Perl when I took a job that required a ton of pattern matching based scripting. I immediately convinced my boss to buy a bunch of Perl books, including this one. Usually, I am the type to use Google more than any book when learning a new language, but this book has been indispensible. I go to it first anytime I want to know how to do something in Perl, and 9 times out of 10 it is the only resource I need. I agree with other reviewers that this is not the book for beginning programmers, but I could have saved my boss a lot of money had I just had her buy me this one. It's all I've needed.

I am not new to programming, but was new to Perl when I took a job that required a ton of pattern matching based scripting. I immediately convinced my boss to buy a bunch of Perl books, including this one. Usually, I am the type to use Google more than any book when learning a new language, but this book has been indispensible. I go to it first anytime I want to know how to do something in Perl, and 9 times out of 10 it is the only resource I need. I agree with other reviewers that this is not the book for beginning programmers, but I could have saved my boss a lot of money had I just had her buy me this one. It's all I've needed.

Definitely THE most overrated programming book I've ever read.
Why?
Well, it's not great for beginners because it's difficult to follow - I read large chunks of this book when I first learned Perl - the Learning Perl book was much better.
Also, the writing is so geeky-cutesy. In every other paragraph, you can feel the authors chuckling at their own stupid Star Trek/Monty Python/Lord of the Rings jokes and references. We get it already, time to watch some new movies/tv shows and read some new books fer chrissakes.
Most of all though, the book is so disorganized. Have a question about a regexp metacharacter? Good luck finding it in this haystack. I know it's not pitched as a pure reference manual, but you would think it would be easy to find out what the difference between * and *? is. It's not.
Perl is incredibly powerful but somewhat painful to learn, which is compounded by the fact that many people rave at how quick and easy it is to become productive with it.
Googling your Perl questions is a lot better than reading the Camel book (the nickname of this book in case you don't know).
The Perl Cookbook rocks though, that's another excellent Perl title.
This is all coming from a devoted Python fan who learned Perl first and respects Perl for its impact on web programming and the newer scripting languages like Python and Ruby.

This is THE book for perl, plain and simple. I've seen people refered to specific page numbers in this book on IRC when they have Perl questions. If you do any significant amount of Perl programming then you really should get this.

I have owned every edition of this book. The 2nd edition was a lot better than the 1st edition, but it is not nearly as good as the 3rd edition. The 3rd edition is the best perl reference book that you can buy. Period.

This book is required reference for any real Perl programmer. From the man himself, inventor of perl. Highly recommend. For beginner, you buy this book and one beginner book too. I am long time perl programmer.

"Programming Perl" simply has everything about Perl you will ever need to know. If it's in Perl, it's in this book, as far as I can tell. Finding what you're looking for will be another matter. The organization of this volume leaves much to be desired. But the index is pretty helpful so searching through this book is a little like looking for a needle in a hay stack, but with a magnet in hand.

But don't let the name fool you: This book is not the place to learn Perl, as I found the hard way. It just simply assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader, and has a horrendous paucity of example code. If Perl is something you are going to explore and use to a great extent, "Programming Perl" will eventually become indispensible to you, I am certain. But if you are new to the language: DANGER! DANGER! ABUNAI!

All things considered, I would give it four stars -- five for its breadth of coverage minus one for its poor organization. But the book's title implies that it is meant as an introduction to Perl, but an introduction it just ain't! The authors say as much themselves in their introduction, but I think the unsuspecting novice deserves to see it on the front cover too. So I am taking away one more star for a total of three.

"Programming Perl": a great reference, a horrid learning tool.

This book is a must have reference for all Perl programmers. I also recomment O'Reilly's "Learning Perl" as a good predecessor to this book.

I could have gotten this book slightly cheaper from a private seller, but this book is a professional programmer's classic. I expect to use it regularly (and I have so far).

It arrived quickly and in good condition.

This is the best Perl book there is. More than this - it's one of the best programming books ever.

It will remain great in ten years when (hopefully) there will be little Perl 5 remaining in the world. It will remain great in fifty years, when little will remain of any modern programming languages and computers will be programmed in French and Swahili. I'm sure that in the year 2044, when i'm sixty-four, i'll sit in my intelligent self-learning digital recliner and read this book, printed on paper and enjoy myself and i will still laugh at Larry's jokes, i will still appreciate the nearly divine elegance of the Perl 5 language, and i will still consider this book as one of the greatest creations of mankind.

Larry Wall is not only a genius programmer, he's a great thinker and writer. This book should be read by everyone - not just by aspiring Perl programmers. And aspiring Perl programmers shouldn't read any other book to learn Perl.

Now go and get your job done!

I found this book very good: complete, comprehensive, introductory to perl-programming philosophy. The author gets your attention using a lot of jokes!

Programming Perl is an awesome book. It is very thorogh in it's coverage of the language. Programming Perl not only explains the what, the how, but also the why. Most books explain/list the what and perhaps the how, but when a book explains the why, it gives you a deeper understanding, and more of a thorough understanding of how to apply the concepts effectively.

Programming Perl is very easy to read and understand, and is quite humorous and enjoyable to boot. Larry Wall is also a trained linguist, and a son of pastor, thus he brings his linguist/philosophical/spiritual background into both the design of Perl and the prose of this book. His goal is to make Perl very useful, very intuitive and comparable to natural language, flexible, and encouraging of the programmer's creativity. These points are lost on some users/programmers, as they are used to rigid rules, sometimes arcane syntax, and having everything laid out in a rigid, linear fashion. Perl allows one to be as rigid as one wants to be, but allows one to be as free form as needed to get the job done and bring out ones creativity. The book Programming Perl is perfect in it's conversational style and humor in conveying this concept.

Also, if one has some programming experience, learning Perl from this book will work out great. If one is very new to programming, perhaps Biginning Perl or Learning Perl will be better.

And I have noticed that those giving this book bad reviews are people mostly expecting a very simple tutorial, in a traditional dry, simple style. When this expectation is not met, they rip the book. That is unfortunate. Also, I think some people just don't like the conversational style and humor - they want to just cut to the chase. That's great for basic references or simple tutorials. But, while Programming Perl has those things, it offers much, much more than those things. Programming Perl offers in-depth detail, understanding, and knowledge. And it is an awesome read as well.

Programming Perl is one of the best, most enjoyable programming books I've ever read - the K&R book and Stroustrup's book rank up there as well. Just like the K&R book is the ultimate on C, and the Stroustrup book is the ultimate on C++, Programming Perl is the ultimate on Perl. And each book reflects the individual languages and their creators design goals, philosophy, and style.

If you are doing serious Perl programming, or if you are simply curious, or if you like it as a hobby, or if you are doing occasion small Perl scripts, or if you are interested in programming in general, Programming Perl is the Perl book to get.

One last note: To those who think Perl is bad or doesn't scale for real world enterprise class applications, think again. Amazon itself is a huge Perl implementation. Much of the interface and application logic you are using here is generated with Perl code. Great stuff.

This is the definitive documentation for Perl, so a distinction between the language and the book would help.

The language:
It's a once useful tool that went gonzo, and that's no complement. It's still a useful tool if you limit the scope of its use and use it with discipline, but that's like saying we'll have the world peace if everyone learned to be nice.

The book:
Wealth of information, seems pretty comprehensive (you can never tell with Perl, though), and much improvement over previous edition, I think - better organized and more descriptive. As for the organization, I doubt you can improve much - the language itself is such a gumbo. A particularly painful aspect is the writing style that litters the pages with all these annoying "jokes" and weak justification for various oddball language features with their superficial similarity to English - I found it easier to go through them when I started to see them as geeky attempt at apology for the mess that Perl turned into.

Overall, if you need to deal with Perl, this, despite the big wart, is probably the best bet in town. Given the nature of the language, the cookbook style books may give you more bang for the buck/time when writing/hacking away new Perl code, but this book would serve you better if you had to deal with other people's Perl code. Also, this book, by being more comprehensive, would guide you better to avoid ugly but tempting practices that Perl allows.

This book is required reference for any real Perl programmer. From the man himself, inventor of perl. Highly recommend. For beginner, you buy this book and one beginner book too. I am long time perl programmer.

I have to admit that before using this book I used "Learning Perl." However everything that I learned in the first book was in the first chapter of this book. I'm very impressed with the layout of this book. Every time I turned a new page I found something else I had to try. One paragraph in chapter six prime outlines the whole reason for really wanting to use pearl.

"Perl doesn't just glue together other computer languages. It also glues together command line interpreters, operating systems, processes, machines, devices, networks, databases, institutions, cultures, web pages, GUIs, peers, servers, and clients, not to mention people like system administrators, users, and of course, hackers, both not be in nice. In fact pearl is rather competitive about cooperative."
This book is well designed to get you off the Ground and hit the deck running. You won't be left standing there like a sitting duck. I doubt that I can give it enough stars.

I was beginning to learn perl and found this book very useful. Later I learnt that it has a lot to offer to the more advanced user of perl as well. Great book to start with.

I learned Perl from man pages a while ago... Then got this book about five or so years ago when I started teaching a class on Perl. Let me tell you, this is the best Perl book out there...

You do need to be able to program to understand this book---and to appreciate many of the insights/jokes it makes. This book is funny! It spends -some- time explaining the syntax, etc., but the true value of this book comes from explaining the motivation for various language features. The philosophy behind Perl. Once you get the philosophy behind Perl, the entire language starts to make a lot of sense---it becomes beautiful, easy to read, understand, etc. The book also answers questions like ``why should I learn Perl?'', and ``what makes it better than other languages?''

The way that I use the book is (in class): You read the first 5 chapters to learn the language (actually, the first 2 chapters are enough to give you a good grasp of how to do pretty much anything), then the rest of the book becomes a pretty good reference on how to do specific things (like networking, threads, OOP, etc.).

Oh, and I use Perl every day for pretty much everything. My rule: if it needs speed, use C, if it needs a GUI, use Java or C#, if it's web-based, use PHP, and for everything else (no particular need; 99% of the stuff that I do) use Perl.

It is nearly impossible to deprecate the book written by the author of a language. Just as there will be no way to replace Kernighan and Ritchie's "The C Programming Language", there will also never be a book that can replace Larry Wall's "Programming Perl".

"Programming Perl" is more then just a tutorial: it's a reference to the Perl language, the perl interpreter, and the Perl mindset. the first several chapters explain--in depth--the features of the Perl language. The middle section offers an explanation of some of the concepts, technologies and hurdles of modern Perl, including Unicode, IPC, threading, and even mixed programming with C. The final section explains all the little "extras" that make Perl so versatile: CPAN, the standard modules, and hints on portability and documentation.

nearly 300 pages of reference tables and charts at the end, round out this magnificent book. This is invaluable for an Perl programmer.

This book is extremeley disorganized and confusing, much like the Perl language itself. The books is filled with clever puns which add nothing to the book except more pages. The internet owes much to Perl, but the language itself is very ad-hoc, filled with confusing and unnecessary symbols ($, $_, @, ->), has a terrible object model, and scales very poorly to larger programs. If you have any choice in the matter, choose Python instead, which is a far more elegant language (Books: Learning Python for beginners or Python in a Nutshell for more advanced user). If you must use Perl, there must be better books than this.

If you are an Engineer trying to make best use of your valuable time, do not buy this book. I am not joking.

The author/authors wrote massive paragraphs on and on in every chapter. They should have explained what they wanted instead, with an example or two. Examples speak louder than tons and tons of paragraphs. I do not think anyone will have time to read each of those paragraphs. For example, read the chapter on Objects, Chapter 12. I bet the paragraphs in this book and in Chapter 12 will you confused and angry. That is how much unpleasant this book is. I have had a better experience referring to The Perl Cookbook, Perl How to Program by Deitel and Learning Perl. I was able to write better programs in less time by referring to those three books instead of this book. I read Programming Perl for 2 weeks and in the end was angry at myself wasting two weeks of precious time reading through all the crappy explanations and tons and tons of paragraphs in this book.

Get Perl Cookbook, Perl How to Program. These two books will be more than sufficient to help you write Perl Scripts in a very short time.

This is the ultimate perl book - but there's so much in it, you can't just read it. Read "Learning Perl", and the write some perl for a while. Then read the first 14 chapters of "Programming Perl", and write some more perl. Then read the first 14 chapters again, and keep writing Perl. Then move on to the rest of the book.

Also, read Lord of the Rings first - it makes the examples much, much easier to follow.

It is a good book and you can learn a lot. However, the "comedy," which is really just a lot of annoying chatter, get in the way a great deal.

This is the Perl programming bible. It's all in here. However there is a caveat, it's a bible so it has some religion in it. The style is somewhat ambling at times and occasionally obtuse. So if you are trying to learn Perl from scratch, read the aptly named "Learning Perl" book first (as I did). This book will then serve as an excellent guide to the more advanced features and a reference.

This isn't the book for a first-time programmer. Outside of that, it's a great reference. Maybe the more advanced language features need more clarification, but it's plenty to get you going on your first few Perl programs.

Perl is a pleasant oddity among programming langauges. It has lots of features that make it great as a "glue" language, for holding other programs together and for doing those irksome little translations between incompatible formats. Those are the things that shell scripts used to do: setting up files, command lines, and environment variables, checking results, preparing reports. Perl does all that, better, and gives you the full power of a programming language on top of it all. That means the transformations aren't at the mercy of available filters, and don't count on the dozen different syntaxes of the dozen different filter programs. It's a great language for all those little one-off tasks that crop up, especially in system and web admin.

That's my problem with Perl, though - the free-wheeling, never-look-back, whatever-works spirit of the people who use Perl. I know there are disciplined, competent software engineers who develop and use Perl, and I don't mean to disparage them at all. Still, the gonzo style that's so common and the revival tent spirit of books like this put me off a bit.

The language is very useful, and make lots of hard jobs easy. This book, despite its true-believer style, gives a thorough introduction to the language and its core APIs.

The humor was too much for me. I tried to be calm and focus on learning Perl. But I gave up after three chapters. The authors take it too casually like a walk in the park, and try strange attempts too seriously to compare Perl with english language. I sold my book back on Amazon and lost nearly 20 dollars in the bargain. But still give it 3 stars because there are sure people who like to do things the light way. As for me, I like books who talk sense, I dont have time to waste reading jokes and silly footnotes.

This book I bought after reading Elizebeth Castros's book "Perl And CGI for the Worl Wide Web". Personally I thought this book would be an intruiging dive into the world of Perl. I was dissapointed at the authors lack of coverage. He goes into this dumb speech about all the nooks and crannies; but fails at giving the reader a simple or otherwise not-so-simple example about a certain perl concept to make the subject more real to the reader. Of course I was able to apply out of curiousity the short examples. But that was because I read Elizebeth Castros's book "Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web"! I could not even apply the data in this book without my head getting spinny!And then running into a wall. Larry Wall's wall har har har! Well the humor is funny. But the book is not worth my time. Im sad that I wasted my precious time reading this junk!
If your interested in progressing to a higher learning level read the book "Core Perl" there are some good O'Reilly books out there, this one sucks! And you may prefer to read the other O'Reilly book about Perl. Of course other readers gave it high praise but they of course probably read other books and used this one as an idiosyncracy! Bypass this one fellas!

This book is like the Perl tax: everyone involved with Perl needs to pay out and get it, whether they want to or not. There is no other place where all the innards and tricky bits of Perl are laid bare. In that regard it's a bit like sendmail admins having to buy the bat book (the o'reilly sendmail book).

But unlike the bat book, and much as I respect this book and its authors, I find using it absolutely infuriating, not least because the index is a mess. Remember that perl is full of obscure little atoms like ., ^, $* and so on. You need an index that lists every darn one and their combinations. Unfortunately, the indexers of this book did not complete the job, which means that if you quickly want to refresh your memory about something small but important (like: whats the regular expression for whitespace, or is it .= or =. for string appends), you have to go trawling through the whole book.

I read the first edition of this book.

After reading some of the reviews here, I am reminded of when I first picked up this book and didn't have the background to fully appreciate it.

After using Perl for several years doing Internet programming, and being exposed to all the languages it's possible to use, I still remain devoted to the work of this man, Larry Wall for what I believe to be the greatest contribution of all to humanity and to computer science.

I stopped here to reaffirm that the third edition will cover Object Oriented programming. Although nobody mentions this, I'm sure he will, and another book I have said it would.

Before brushing up on Object Oriented programming for Perl, I decided to re-read Learning Perl and Programming Perl (though I only had the first editions). Unlike the first times I attempted to read these two books, this time I was dumbfounded at how much info they (Larry and Randal) could cram into such a short place. One thing builds upon another. Everything written, the examples and all, took on new meaning. This was exciting reading because all the problems that it took me years to even identify were spelled out before me with examples I could immediately understand. There are many ways to do things in Perl, and my way, the obvious way, usually turns out to be the long way. Reading these books and adopting some new techniques they mention could literally save me years of time!

It's a lot like learning music. Unless someone tells you why you have to learn scales, you won't enjoy doing it and unless you stick with it long enough, you'll never learn why you need to know them.

I guess I'd have to say that sooner or later you will need these two books to be truly effective as a Perl programmer, but if you are a beginner, you won't know enough about Perl to realize why these are really great books. If you have several years of Perl experience, then these books will show you how to be incredibly effective, incredibly organized, and best of all, incredibly lazy!

One thing that makes Perl so strong, is that anything that has ever been done with Unix can be done with Perl. If you're operating equipment with Microsoft software, you're missing half the fun.

This book really shines if you already love Perl and worship those who spent enormous amounts of time making their priceless contributions.

This is probably not a good book if you're new to Perl, in a hurry, and are trying to debug some broken code.

I found "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days" by Sams Publishing to be all I needed in my early days. I only wish I had the ability to appreciate the information in these other two books then.

I am convinced that Perl is the highest level programming language there is and there is absolutely nothing that can't be done with it in less time and with less code than any other language.

Now I'm going to buy a brand new Programming Perl 3rd edition and I think I'll even have it shipped overnight!

Programming Perl is a great reference book for Perl which is something one would expect considering it comes from the creator of perl himself! The index is very well done and includes all of the *weird* characters which perl likes to use such as $_, @_, etc..

If you're new to perl, then I'd suggest also purchasing "Learning Perl" by the same publisher. It's probably a bit easier to use when just picking up the language - but the reference book is a must have as well.

This is the definitive book on Perl. First off, it's from Larry, the main who invented and is maintaining Perl. Second, it's a very well written and edited book that provides some concise material both on the syntax and the philosophy of Perl. A must read for Perl programmers. Period.

For somebody who is a "linguist", Larry Wall has a horrid writing style that interferes with learning important concepts. For example, he constantly names object "thingys". For example:

...but a hard reference just points to a thingy. It doesn't know (or care) whether there are any other references to the thingy, or whether any of those references are through variables. Hence, a hard rerefence can refer to an anonymous thingy. As such anonymous thingies...

The minute you notice this, you stop reading and just count all the references to "thingy" on a page. its a staggering number. By writting in this style, it seriously detracts from the readablity. I didn't buy this book for it's writing style, I bought it as a reference to perl. Surely there is a better term then "thingy". In fact, I'm not even sure what "thingy" is susposed to refer to as I have yet to find a definition in the book.

Plus he always uses "just" to modify his sentences. This gives this book a very condecending tone as if all these concepts are JUST obvious (you idiot). "to do this, just blah blah" . I hate to say it, but this "everything is obvious" attitude is rife in the perl community and it's a shame that Larry promotes it in his book. Nothing is "just" and nothing is obvious, if it was, why are you "just" spending 4 pages talking about it?

Poorly written and highly overrated. No good for beginners or experts. There has to be a better book out there on perl then this "bible".

This is indeed the most awesome PERL book.

Written by Larry Wall, who is Mr. Perl.

If you get but once PERL book, get this one,

Ahum!. The absolute reference. If you get lost somewhere in a place without many resources for survival, food or drink, but with a book, try it not to be this one. Perhaps too caloric specifically.... yeah. Is a logical bomb of Perl... a strong weapon in the hands of an aficionado. This is the demostration that Perl wasn't intended to be easy to understand, intededly. Unfortunately, many people doesn't use pop (package oriented programming), or perl, (package entertainment reoriented language) itself and that's why the misleading.

Thanks, Larry, it's one of the most imperfectly conserved books I have due and due to intellective uses only. Great!