computers and internet

The main advantage of the book is that it is short. The second edition is not much different from the first one and if you like to buy the book you can save some money buying the first edition -- it still can be found 50%-75% off).

It's just an introduction to Perl 4 not to Perl 5, but as Perl 4 is a reasonable subset of Perl to master at the beginning level it's OK approach.

The second edition is disappointing. It's kind of Randall L. Schwartz fiasko. The "Just Another Perl Hacker" as any hacker should be lazy, but probably not to such an extent: the only one new chapter (brief overview of CGI) and one new appendix (listing of standard Perl modules) were added (probably by Tom Christiansen, as the team now include him). The examples and exercises are identical to the the first edition. Go for Perl Complete instead, if this will be your first book. Skip this book if you already have at least one introductory book on Perl in this case better get Effective Perl Programming instead.

I've been a Unix user for seven+ years, and have some programming experience, although I am by no means really knowledgable about either. When I entered my most recent job, I needed to learn Perl fast, and so I used this book to help me get started.

From a self-teaching perspective, I found this book to be exactly what I needed. I'll admit that the first chapter (a general description of the Perl language) was not very helpful, but I found the division of the rest of the book by small pieces of the syntax (scalars, arrays, hashes, regular functions, i/o, etc.) to suit my needs, which tended to be along the lines of: I need to do x right now. I learned the easy stuff really quickly, and I still use the book as a constant reference.

Now, it is just a beginner's text, so it is not an ideal complete reference, and you won't learn anything particularly nifty. However, if you need to both learn how to program and actually do some programming at the same time (i.e. not in a class-room setting), Learning Perl can be a wonderful text.

This book is aimed at Perl novices and sys admins who need to get up to speed quickly. As with most O'Reilly books I found the authors know thier stuff and the book was well edited.

The book contains enough info to allow you to script most sys admin tasks, and has the benefit of being short and therefore easy to carry, but once you get a taste of Perl's power you will no doubt want to get the "camel" (programming perl), which is more comprehensive.