Perl Developer's Guide [With CDROM]

Excellent treatment of topics. I still haven't read the whole book, but the chapters on Functions, Contexts and References were very enlightening, and the clearest explanation I've ever read. It has lots of diagrams explaining how Perl recognizes and translates code. For instance, the chapter on Functions has detailed explanation of the Argument Stack ("@_"). Think of it as a sort of Camel Book illustrated.

Perl Developer's Guide starts off a bit rough. The first chapter, An Overview of Perl, is enough to make anyone put away the book. But after getting scalars and arrays down pat, everything takes off. PDG will introduce you to almost everything Perl can do. From Windows programming to GUIs to CGI, this book has it all.

This book was both clear and concise. That is a difficult job. I was impressed that throughout the entire book, I didn't find any bloated garbage. It was a pleasure to read.

This book is the much needed update to the first book by Ed and Michelle, published in 1998 that went by a different name, "Perl 5, Complete". The first book came out way too early with too many errors. Ed acknowledges this in his preface to the second edition. I enjoyed his first book, because catching errors made me learn the material better, but the second edition is soo much better.High points for this second edition include:1) a good tutorial for object-oriented programming starting with creating modules up to full object-oriented programming with perl/tk.2) a great section on data-structures like arrays-of-arrays, and hash of hashes, etc... that are essential if you want to do intermediate or above Perl programming.3) A great chapter on real-world examples using perl/tk and OLE programing with Perl for Microsoft Windows plus other code samples.4) Some great new appendixes for Perl "grammer and structure" that weren't in the first edition. Basically a concise reference for symantics that would benefit anybody.5) A much improved index that was practically non-existent in the first edition.All in all, I would say the second edition would be a good edition to learning and even improving your Perl skills since it is a huge tome of Perl information that can be both used as a reference and as a tutorial.