The reference section is great, though it smacks of a collection of perldoc extracts.

The index is a bit weak. A "good" reference
has to help you find what you're looking for.

The introductory chapters suck -- even if you
have LOTS of programming under your belt, and
want a fast ramp-up. But you can learn Perl from them, with a lot of slogging to see the structure beneath the writing. These chapters jump around incoherently, presume you know terms and features before they are presented, presume you ALREADY know what they are talking about. I could list dozens of bugaboos that a decent editor should have caught. In that atmosphere, the recurrent moments of smug cuteness get tiring.

Perl seems a bit like a collection of many neat individual mechanisms, which can each be largely understood in relative isolation. You might call it "orthogonal modularity". This seems both the source of strength and points of weakness of Perl but the introductions in the book could have exploited it more profitably.

In short, like the language, the book has plenty of substance but it's a bit under-edited, lacking structure and clarity.