This is THE best book on the market for learning PERL from scratch without necesarrily having any prior programming background. The book is elegant, consise, thorough, and takes users step by step from knowing nothing about PERL, to knowing PERL at a very comfortable intermediate level. It comes with my highest possible recommendation. If you however are coming from a background of programming experience and don't want to be hand held you're better off with Progamming PERL, because that simply is.. The PERL "bible". :-)