Average Customer Review: 
Many people are familiar with the UNIX in a Nutshell book that O'Reilly has published. These books cover the complete base UNIX Operating System (the commands with their parameters). UNIX administrators, like myself, went nuts over this book. This book was what we wanted, a good reference book that covered the commands with their appropriate switches without being a tutorial. UNIX in a Nutshell is the best reference book for UNIX on the market, hands down. Not only was the book a good reference based on how it was laid out, but for also being totally technically correct. O'Reilly has done it again, but this time with Perl. Perl in a Nutshell is not exactly what I expected from the book but instead it has a lot more to the book. The book was logically laid out by being broken down into eight sections and twenty chapters. The sections are Getting Started, Language Basics, Modules, CGI, Databases, Networking Perl/TK, Win32, & PerlScript. Going from the basics of the language to more advanced topics is a great design so the book will useful to many different people at different levels of knowledge and skill. As a previous college professor, I know that this book is perfect for the student and professional programmer. The modules section covers the standard modules that come with Perl. Not only does it list the standard modules but gives descriptions with a list of the functions. Not to mention that it lists all the parameters/switches for each function also. For example, the module File::Find has two functions within, find & finddepth. The Perl/TK section lists all the standard switches and options for all the function in the TK.pm module. This section is also a great companion to the Perl/TK book. If you ever do any web programming, then the section on CGI is invaluable. Mod_perl and CGI.pm are both covered in the book, along with LWP. This book will be very useful while developing all my new web based applications. The section on Win32 Perl was one of the more complete listing of modules/functions for the 32bit Windows platform. Network programming will be a breeze with the quick reference of all the network functions, including things like telnet, ftp, and IPC. The whole book has plenty of sample code explaining the different aspects of Perl. While reading the book, you can tell that the authors spent a great deal of time making sure that the book was easily readable. Perl in a Nutshell has all the relevant material in one easy to use reference book. What the book is not is a tutorial or a training guide. If you do not know Perl already, then you are better off with the Camel book (Programming Perl) or the llama book (Learning Perl), both from O'Reilly also. For someone like myself that needs reminding of the parameters/switches for various commands, the Nutshell book is perfect. This book is a must have for your zoo collection. I do have one negative thing to say about the book, and that is it should have been out sooner.
This is the fourth, and probably last, general-purpose Perl book I'll own. Learning Perl makes a fine tutorial, but it misses the advanced topics and extensive libraries. The pocket reference is too concise for anything but the very basic standard functions. And Programming Perl is too sprawling for a good quick reference yet still too small to delve into the complex topics well.Perl in a Nutshell does for Perl what the excellent Java in a Nutshell did for Java. It lets me find what I'm looking for right away so I spend less time with my nose in a book and more time getting my programs working. What more could one hope for in a reference book?
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