My edition is a little old now, but this is absolutely the best book on Perl if you want to learn this powerful, complex language. Just be sure to get the newest edition available. ( )

The original "Llama" book from O'Reilly, this was an outstanding introduction to the mysteries of this powerful programming language. Twinned with Larry Wall's "Camel" book, the pair took many of us from stunned neophytes to halfway competent authors of code that worked. ( )

Perl is an open source CGI scripting and web programming language. Perl is one of the most popular web programming languages because of its powerful text-manipulation capabilities. A huge number of Perl scripts are freely available on the web for download.

This textbook was written to be a gentle introduction to Perl. It is not a comprehensive guide to Perl. It is a companion volume to Programming Perl, Second Edition by Larry Wall, Randal L. Schwartz, and Tom Christiansen.

Advanced topics at the end of the book cover CGI programming, library modules, references, and object-oriented programming.

Perl will run on practically any computer platform including MS-DOS, VMS, OS/2, Macintosh, all flavors of Windows, UNIX, and Linux,

The exercises in the book can be downloaded from http://www.oreilly.com or by FTP.

You can visit the Perl home page at http://www.perl.com/perl/. ( )

A standard reference.

This book was required for class for Library School. Compared to other Perl books I looked at through the semester, this book is long, confusing and drawn out. Some areas could and have been explained much better in other books. This is only recommended for people who understand programming already and not for beginners. ( )