A hard book to rate

This book is extremely difficult to rate because it has some major strengths and also some major weaknesses. I could pretty much give this book a rating anywhere between 1 and 5 stars and justify it. That being said, I have learned a lot of perl through reading the book & doing the excellent exercises that are provided (with answers), therefore it deserves a decent rating despite its faults.

The book is an overview of the language, not a reference. It's a tutorial that takes you through the major language features. Some of the chapters are regular expressions, filehandles, formats, hashes, functions, etc. The writing is generally clear and accessible and the examples are very well done. Most people should feel comfortable using perl after working through this book.

The real failing of the book is that it is pitched as a Win32 book but it is full of UNIX-centric examples and idioms. The chapter on DBM is likely to go unused by almost every Windows programmer and there is not much coverage of OLE automation/COM/ActiveX, which is key to Windows. The book would also have benefitted from a look at Windows system administration tasks and how to automate these with perl.

Another minor frustration is the "Topics We Didn't Mention" appendix. This book is only 220 pages + appendices, index, forewords and there could easily have been room for discussing those topics (like basic networking, security, the compiler).

In short, it's a good book to learn perl with if you're stuck using NT at work like me. That being said, the book is rough around the edges and could be polished significantly in a future edition.

Perl for Win32 People

     I know this book has been bashed by some of the Amazon reviewers. However, I think the book has a particular audience (no surprise by the title): new Perl developers who are not from a UNIX background. It succeeds for that audience.

I love the O'Reilly books on Perl, and this book is written by the most influential people in Perl (apart from Larry).

I come from a UNIX background, I still found this book helpful. In fact, I even bought the book for my brother-in-law, who wanted to learn Perl on Win32.

The Activestate Win32 Perl distribution was a baby at the time of the release - it would be nice if it could be updated, especially regarding Perl Package Manager. This is nitpicking, though.

To quote James Taylor, this book is "enough to be on your way". It gets the novice initiated into Perl and hungry for more. After that, there are some great O'Reilly titles (The Camel Book, the DBI book, the Sys Admin book) and Lincoln Stein titles (The CGI.pm book for web development, the socket book), as well as the Internet to move to.

I really love the O'Reilly Perl for Sys Admins book. It seems like I go back to that book and find something new each time.