Rating: 

I am just finishing up with Learning Perl and am very dissapointed. I expected this book to be aimed for beginners, and to be well written. You can't expect someone new to fill in the blanks themselves, but Mr. Schwartz does.

The most exciting part about having a "Learning" book is that it comes with Exersises at the end of the chapters. These exersises are lame, to be blunt. They aren't explained well enough, and the chapters preceding them don't give you all the knowledge to complete them.

The worst part is the answers at the end of the chapters where Mr. Schwartz has the ability to make you feel like you've learned nothing. He'll write the code (That you must match your code to) using techniques that he never teaches, and using bad techniques as well (command; command; command; [Look, one line of code!). On one he even says, "Yes, this one needs some explaining." But never explains! It needed explaining because there were way too many things there not mentioned in the chapter/book.

There are frequent code-flaws in his examples throughout the pages.

Be warned. If you must learn Perl, then you'll need to buy more than just this book. If you know nothing about programming, or shell scripting, then I'm afraid that this book could become too difficult.

-JD