Perl is probably one of the best languages to learn if you just want to have a programming language in your toolkit and this book is a great resource for learning Perl.
If you're new to programming Perl introduces many of the concepts that you'll need to master while allowing a lot of flexibility.
I don't know if 24 hours is quite enough to complete this book, but the short focused lessons make learning fun.

I spent about 2000 hours learning Perl. I think PERL is a great scripting language which can teach you advanced programming techniques versus what you may have learned in basic or visual basic. It is easier than other languages like C to make simple or complex scripts which accomplish something useful without getting bogged down in writing a lot of extra code that might be the case in C.

I looked at this and other similar 24 hour computer books. I already knew how to program in basic so I understood the basics. My problem with this book is a false idea that a person with little or no programming ability could pick this book and learn the basics of Perl or any other advanced programming language in just 24 hours. Programming requires understanding and time and a great deal of practice. I think a book like this sets the reader up for failure by trying to achieve a realistic goal in an unrealistic time frame . I myself settled on a different book by Simon Cozens called Beginning Perl. The book uses PERL to teach programming basics chapter by chapter letting the reader set their own pace. If you want to learn programming know that it takes a lot of time and is very intimidating at times. The knowledge comes from a little reading and a tons of practice. If you want to learn programming do it for the love of the subject and not with the idea of making a lot of money as a programmer which is a long shot these days.

As someone that knew very little about computer programming bar some Fortran classes about 15 years ago, this is a great book. It takes you step by step through the aspects of Perl and explains the different computer language terminology to idiots like myself (e.g. arrays, scalers etc).
However, one thing I would say is that each chapter is not one hour.
If you work on each one properly (take notes, do the exercises etc) its more like 2 hours per chapter.

As someone that knew very little about computer programming bar some Fortran classes about 15 years ago, this is a great book. It takes you step by step through the aspects of Perl and explains the different computer language terminology to idiots like myself (e.g. arrays, scalers etc).
However, one thing I would say is that each chapter is not one hour.
If you work on each one properly (take notes, do the exercises etc) its more like 2 hours per chapter.

[A review of the 3RD EDITION 2005.]

Pierce gives an updated introduction for Perl, describing the latest version 5.8. Though realistically, if you are new to Perl, you'd be doing fine even if the book didn't reach up to that version. Perl is a very stable, mature language, which is probably what you want.

If you already know another language, then many or all of the concepts in this book will be familiar. It just becomes a question of plowing through the chapters, to learn the Perl syntax.

In Pierce's presentation, he quickly takes you to what Perl calls a "hash". In Java, the corresponding class is a Hashtable. Regardless of terminology, the idea is a very useful one, and if you intend to be a proficient Perl programmer, you need to have this down pat. Earlier material in the text, like scalars and arrays, are pretty trivial to understand and use. The hash table is trickier, but Pierce does a good job in conveying its usage. He avoids the maths theory behind this, but points out that it gives you quick access to a value associated with a key, where this access is not proportional [ie. linear] to the number of keys in the table. He doesn't actually say it's logarithmic, which it is. [For the theory, Cf. Knuth "Art of Computer Programming" vol 3.]

Learn the hash. Experienced programmers [in any language] already know its value. In all of the book, it is the best glimpse into advanced algorithmic coding.

As with the other titles in the Sam's Teach Yourself xxx in 24 Hours series, this book aims at quickly arming you with enough knowledge of Perl to start programming in the language in no time. If you are a complete newbie to programming, this book is not for you, because it takes a "focus on the trees, ignore the forest" approach. In other words, you are thrown into coding right away. There's no high-level discussion of data structures and programming gotchas, etc. There's a lot of stuff crammed into each lesson, and some of the lessons will likely take more than an hour (and more than one pass) to understand. While this is not a reference at all, and many subtle details are omitted (which is actually a bad thing in the long run because Perl is such a complicated language), the book does get you started quickly. A lot of practical examples are given to show you how the language works, and many of the snippets included can be used in your actual programming endeavors. For example, you can take the code to find unique elements in a list as is and use it without any modification (save for using your own variable names).

If you already have some programming background and need just one book to learn Perl quickly, this is the book for you. After this, I'd recommend the "camel book", i.e., "Programming Perl" published by O'Reilly, which gives a forest-over-trees treatment to the language, plus it contains a useful reference on the language.

As with the other titles in the Sam's Teach Yourself xxx in 24 Hours series, this book aims at quickly arming you with enough knowledge of Perl to start programming in the language in no time. If you are a complete newbie to programming, this book is not for you, because it takes a "focus on the trees, ignore the forest" approach. In other words, you are thrown into coding right away. There's no high-level discussion of data structures and programming gotchas, etc. There's a lot of stuff crammed into each lesson, and some of the lessons will likely take more than an hour (and more than one pass) to understand. While this is not a reference at all, and many subtle details are omitted (which is actually a bad thing in the long run because Perl is such a complicated language), the book does get you started quickly. A lot of practical examples are given to show you how the language works, and many of the snippets included can be used in your actual programming endeavors. For example, you can take the code to find unique elements in a list as is and use it without any modification (save for using your own variable names).

If you already have some programming background and need just one book to learn Perl quickly, this is the book for you. After this, I'd recommend the "camel book", i.e., "Programming Perl" published by O'Reilly, which gives a forest-over-trees treatment to the language, plus it contains a useful reference on the language.

Reading this book is kind of like riding a bicycle for the first time. First, you sit on the bike and place your feet on the pedals - in the beginning of the book, you slowly learn about variables, arrays and how Perl programs are constructed. So far, everything's doing great. You're understanding everything that is being said to you, then all of a sudden you get pushed down a huge hill going at a very fast speed. Before you know it, you crashed. That's how it is reading Clinton's book. The beginning is great - great introduction and you start to feel your confidence grow as you tell yourself, 'I can do this!' After Chapter 5, everything goes chaotic. Clinton slams difficult tasks in your face without providing any answers or solutions to his exercises. After every chapter, there is a quiz that gives you around 3 questions and answers about the chapter you just read. The book then provides you with very difficult exercises that have no solutions provided for you. I felt very lost and disorganized on some chapters that describe regular expressions and filehandles. The author has two different chapters on files - one for filehandles and one for opening, reading, and writing files. That was one of the most common sense things Clinton should've done: Kept all the file(s) information in ONE chapter instead of spreading it out between 2 chapters that are half length of the book away from each other. Another problem that kept arousing were his code examples. A lot of his code included extra garble that was not necessary for successful completion of the program. Also, a lot of his examples did not work properly. On one of the other chapters that discussed databases, Clinton wrote an database look-up program that you could look up people by their e-mail address or phone number. The problem with that was you couldn't add any people to the database using his code and I had to modify it extensively to get it to work. I had to get help from other sources throughout that chapter and throughout his book to accomplish the tasks.

I will tell you that I did learn the fundamentals of Perl using this book, but there were many, many times that I wanted to throw it against the wall. I highly recommend two books instead of Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours. For people who want to learn Perl and learn it well, check out Randal L. Schwartz & Tom Phoenix's 'Learning Perl 3rd Edition' by O'Reilly publishing. That book creates an amazing foundation to master Perl AND provides answers to all the exercises. People who would like to learn the basics of Perl with extensive CGI programming, check out Jacqueline D. Hamilton's 'CGI Programming 101: Perl for the World Wide Web.' Jackie's book is an amazing piece of literature that provides you with great coding examples that work and are understanding. She even updates her website daily to update her code and add great new features to it.

Both books are great priced and are a more reasonable alternative to Clinton Pierce's book. If you have a solid programming background, then you might get through this book in a breeze, but if you're a beginner, leave the copy on the bookshelf.

Sam's Teach Yourself Pearl in 24 hours covers Perl basics and CGI basics for the web. It discusses about SSI (server side includes) on the surface. Even even better still, it comes with a CDROM with the Perl interpreter which you can install on your PC/Mac. So you can immediately get up and running with writing Perl programs and trying the exercises.

I got the book on Sunday evening. By Monday night, I had completed a Customer Review system for my webpage. It is similar to this page that you are currently reading. By Thursday night, I had completed a real time inventory check status. It's the one that says whether the item is in stock.

I must say that this book has made me a very productive programmer. I had learnt and implemented so many stuffs in just 4 days compared to the weeks and months of web surfing and trying to figure out what people were saying on forums. Now I already know how to implement wishlists, gift certificates, logins, forums, etc.

Before you get the assumption that it's so easy, let me explain my background. I'm a programmer by profession and a damm good one. With over 10 years programming experience, I have twice won awards for programming genius. My contribution was so good, it got translated to Spanish and published by several other magazines. I'm trying to impress upon you that I am reading this book from a very skilled programmer point of view. But I have no knowledge of Perl whatsoever.

When I picked up this book, I expected Perl to be cakewalk, but I was a bit disappointed by the way the information was presented. It is sometimes too technical for a first timer and the author fails to clearly explain what a function does. It is sometimes lacking in illustrations and also contains a lot of questions designed to trick the student. Until now, despite reading certain chapters over and over, I still cannot understand what the author is teaching.

If you understand programming fundamentals, then this could be a good book for you. It covers a wide range of topics. And you still can get by even if certain explanations are less clear.

But if you a a newbie programmer, then I don't recommend this book because without some programming background, you may not understand at all what the book is saying. Imagine scalars, arrays, lists, hashes. There's no clear explanation what they are, but dives straight into how to declare and use them with complex examples. If you don't know what is an array or loop, then this book is not for you. If a seasoned programmer like me have trouble understanding certain parts, then a lot of other people will also not understand it.

It's a good book, provided you can understand it. I wish the examples were simpler and better illustrated.

As a Perl neophyte, the book was totally unhelpful. It did not describe clearly the most basic functions a new user would want to know like reading a file, parsing it, matching patterns, etc. Look elsewhere.

It introduces Perl in an easy and effective way, with exercises and quizzes at the end of every chapter. It's not just a reference book, it's a book to learn by. It touches on Database programming in Perl and CGI programming. There isn't a better choice for a beginning Perl programmer.

in the begging, the book teaches you the basics very well, i learned it very fast. As the book goes on, it becomes increasenly more boring, it almost put me to sleep. the bad thing is, the harder to learn stuff, the topics you need to really pay attention to, is the most boring of all.

I concur with the previous review. I bought this book, one month and a half ago and I am now very efficiently programming a lot of interesting little programs. I was programming 10 years ago but stopped practicing since then and I recently wanted to program a few things related to language processing (for which perl turns out to be marvelously appropriated). This book enable me to get working almost immediately. It's full of useful and practical advice that enabled me to get to the core of learning perl.

I never learned a language so quickly and with so amazing results.

If you have a project (like a research or a prototyping project -- as I do ) to handle while reading this book, you will probably find that this book really help you get into it. As far as I am concerned the book help me start implementing my ideas almost immediately. Of course at the beginning my implementations were inefficient and clumsy but the book progressively me understand how to do it better and more efficiently. This is an extremely good way to learn as it is both concrete, "feedbackfull' and help to understand why and how this perl language is useful.

The only reservation I would express concerns regular expression were the book does provide all the basics but des not give enough example on how to combine this knowledge. Don't misundertstand me: it did help me get introduced to regular expressions (to the point that I use them almost daily now) but I felt the need for more materials and practical examples on this important aspect of the perl language.

....

This is HONESTLY the first book I have found (yes!) that really tries to TEACH the reader. I can be anywhere (not just in front of my system) and read through and learn and learn the stuff I need to know, useful stuff. I have went through them all folks, and Clinton Pierce deserves many kudos for how he laid out and wrote this book.

Typos are a minimum but I found several source listings that had a different variable name (in particular, FILEHANDLE name) than was mentioned in the source code explanation following.

So far, so good, this book has saved me from having to hire a Perl programmer (for the time being).

I had a necessity to learn Perl and use it immediately on my Job. While I was browsing through volumes and volumes of books written on Perl, I was lucky to find this book. This was one of the best introductory books written on Perl. It keeps you awake and gives the right amount of Perl knowledge to start implementing it right away. I will be looking out for any other books written by Clinton Pierce, on computer programming.