For folks who are new to PERL this is a good book to learn the language. The presentation is easy to understand and illustrations help us grasp the concepts faster. There are exercises at the end of each chapter which helps in getting to do hands-on programming. I would have liked more exercises in some of the chapters. It would have been better if there were questions / challenges spread along the chapter.

LEARNING PERL is a programming library's foundation title and a highly recommended pick: it covers all the basics of what most programmers use and need to get started with Perl, and offers up a fifth edition of a classic first published in 1993. The latest changes to the software including Perl 5.10 are covered in chapters that discuss file operations, expressions, matching, and more. It also covers all kinds of platforms, from web applications to finance, and goes beyond the usual 'how to program in Perl' book to enhance the methods and approaches of the Perl programmer.

The book is irritating. (-2 star) I keep wasting my time looking for every little star, cross, double cross, ... symbol in the text. Almost every page has comments at the bottom, and these comments are denoted by tiny symbols. I'd like to see the authors find all the text that goes with all those comments. They really need to listen to their own advice and write the book for people who will be reading it.
The book is incomplete. (-1 star) The authors keep mentioning things that will be discussed later or not at all. I have to look for the topics on the Internet to get an explanation.
The book uses terms without fully explaining them. A beginner would not understand the terms without looking them up on the Internet. (-1 star)
The book covers some interesting syntax rules. (+1 star)
The book gives exceptions to the rules. (+1 star)
The book is up-to-date. (+1 star)
The book gives fully contained examples (+1 star)

An oft-repeated allegation against Perl is that it is write-only. In my opinion, this allegation is usually made by programmers proficient in other languages that have trouble understanding or following Perl idioms (one trivial example: the use of for loops instead of the Perl-native foreach loop).

The value of this book is that it teaches a beginner how to use idiomatic Perl. Someone learning Perl from this book will, in course of time, distinguish between line noise and well-written Perl.

A small subset of Perl is covered, not quite sufficient for much other than basic text processing; however the learning provides a firm base for exploration of other Perl books in O'Reilly's Perl menagerie. Specifically, the "Camel" book (Programming Perl) becomes a lot easier to read once the reader has completed this book and work through its exercises.

In sum, this is the best book for a gentle introduction to a very useful language.

This is the book which led me into the Perl world. It's not the first Perl book I read. Before came to this book, I read some other books, took online lessions, etc. but it's this easy reading book did the work. I also bought the cookbook but never touch it. The knowledge from this book is quite enough for routine use of Perl for basic but useful scripting. If you're new to Perl, this is the right book for you.