Reviews for Programming Perl: There's More Than One Way To Do It

1. Worth the money

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2010

   A very comprehensive book.
   A bit too big if you want to use for learning the language as a beginner, but definitely a precious element to keep on your bookshelf.
   A well written book where all the concepts are clearly explained.
   Searching into the index if often quicker than googling it!

2. Badly organised

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, February 12rd, 2010

   I find this book frustrating and difficult to use. I seem to do "a serial search" every time I try to find something. It is too "chatty" and takes too much time to get to the point. It is neither a tutorial nor a reference.

3. Essential, but verbose and irritating

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2009

   This is the book I learned Perl from - or at least tried to. All the information you need is in here, but it is not always easy to find, and the authors often seem more interested in explaining implementation details than broad concepts which might actually help you understand the language.
   
   In general, the prose is awfully verbose: this book could be halved in length and become a lot more readable in the process. The style is discursive and digressive, and cluttered with lame attempts at humour.
   
   This book is very much like Perl itself: useful, but untidy, annoying and difficult to follow. I learned a lot more from Tom Christiansen's superb Perl Cookbook, and the nice little Perl Pocket Reference.

4. Not If you want to learn in a hurry

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2008

   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.
   

5. If your serious about Perl then get this book!

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2008

   This is the first book I read on Perl and I must say it was absolutely excellent. It gives a thorough understanding of the language and is a vital reference for anyone who is serious about Perl.
   
   It doesn't receive the full 5 for me though as inexperienced programmers may struggle with the content. If you don't have much programming experience I would suggest Learning Perl as a starter then move on to this book.