This is an excellent book. Randal and Tom did a great job. This book assumes absolutely no programming experience with Perl, but it does assume some "minor" previous programming experience. If you have never programmed before, you "might" find this book hard. If you are not coming from the unix environment, you might find chapter 7 "regular expressions" hard. I read this book front to back, and backwards, and it was well enjoyed tho I have tons of previous programming experience. The book is a little bit quick paced, but that is the lovely aspect of it. I like books that get straight to the point with sample example. If you are going to learn Perl, this is door number 1. Uzo