This book is the reason I no longer use Perl (except when forced to work on legacy code). Perl 4 was a nice language, if a bit kitchen-sinky. The Camel Book for Perl 4 was a great introduction to the language and got me up and running in no time.

Perl 5 is an abomination of a language. A whole bunch of marginally useful material was added to it at a tremendous increase in complexity. This edition of the Camel Book highlights the new Perl perfectly -- it is a much harder read than the original book and it didn't actually add much (and lost a lot!) to the original.

I program in Python when I want to do script hacking these days.