Review by Billy Barron

"Learning Perl" by Christainsen & Schwartz (O'Reilly; ISBN 1-56592-284-0) is a book for learning Perl. I originally learned Perl from Programming Perl before this book existed. However, "Learning Perl" is actually the better book for Perl beginners to use.

It starts from the ground up with Perl in a series of lessons. Each lesson gets more advanced. By the end of the book, you are writing CGI scripts in Perl using Object Oriented Perl 5. Amazingly, it does all of this in a relatively thin book. The length is short because the lessons are to the point and clear.

In summary, it is a worthy book to learn Perl from. After finishing this book, you will still need a copy of Programming Perl to use as a more advanced guide and reference book though.