Larry Wall wrote Perl and he wrote Programming Perl. Better yet, he writes amusingly and well--all of which comes across in this latest edition of the definitive guide to the language.

Like Topsy, Perl just grew, and as a result so has Programming Perl. It's now over 1,000 pages but needs to be as it does several different jobs. Firstly, it's an introduction to the Perl language for those new to programming. It's a guide for those coming from other languages and it's a Perl language reference.

Larry Wall is a linguist, among his other interests, and perhaps for this reason Perl is a peculiarly flexible language with many routes to achieving the same ends, as the authors ably demonstrate. It's also extensible in several ways, designed to work with many other languages and, as it's largely interpreted, Perl programs tend to run unmodified on a variety of platforms--though platform-specific Perl modules and programming practices are also discussed.

A major strength of Programming Perl is the way subject areas are approached from several directions. This constant viewpoint-shifting eliminates blind spots in the reader's understanding as well as providing a pleasing echo of the way Perl itself can take many routes from here to there.

Because the Perl community is both knowledgeable and active the language covers a lot more ground than it did at the time the last edition of Programming Perl was published. Even if you have both previous editions you'll want this latest version--if only for the new jokes. --Steve Patient

2008-09-25 Not If you want to learn in a hurry

This book makes good bed time reading, but it is no good for learning in a hurry. The book contains humorous comments and anecdotes, but these are just annoying to someone trying to learn in a hurry. The book is structured for somebody who wants to write a compiler for perl rather than a user of perl. Chapters often contains vague references to other chapters of the book that are difficult to follow, and end up in a dog eared book as you continuously search for references.

The idiomatic english is probably not suitable to non english speakers with technical english.