I knew nothing about Perl and bought this book because other Amazon reviewers said it was good for newbies, and I found that to be true as well. In contrast, Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" book, which I flipped through in the bookstore, is just too hard for a complete newbie. However, the book falls a little short when addressing Perl's more advanced functions and features. The "Going Deeper" section found in each chapter is easily the most annoying aspect of the book. In each "Going Deeper" section, the author touches on some interesting and advanced features of Perl without going into any depth or providing code examples. Get this book to learn Perl but get something more advanced so that you can actually use Perl for something useful.
Also, there were way too many typos in this book. It's difficult to get rid of typos, but a programming book must be free of typos in its code examples otherwise the reader does not know whether his programs are crashing because of his own mistakes or the book's typos. Some reviewers state that some typos are inevitable in any book with lots of code examples. I disagree. Anyone providing code examples should test and debug it before publishing it. I wouldn't want my name on a book which had buggy code because of typos, so I don't see why any professional author would do the same.
I went to the book's website to list some of the typos but aside from the home page, the rest of the website has not been constructed. Hopefully, the author will get around to finishing the website so that readers can post where typos can be found and the author can provide errata pages as well as correcting mistakes for the second edition.
