Larry Wall

Excellent reference work. It was better, back in the first edition, when the programming examples were co-bound, but it's really getting so huge (all the useful libraries) I can see why they don't do that any more.

TMTOWDI!

This book has more information in the first few chapters than most entire perl books. I am a big fan of the "logically break things down to every last detail" genre of programming manuals (see The C Programming Language, Programming in Lua) and this book is one of the great examples of it.

The "Camel Book", as this book is often called, is the Perl Bible. It's not only an exhaustive reference, but clearly written any *funny* to boot. The humour pervades the text, making a sometimes dry subject much more approachable.

No Perl programmer can afford to be without this book, and anybody considering writing a technical reference should refer to this book to see how it's done.

I would say that this is THE BOOK for learning Perl. Funny and easy to read.