I am now a little bit embarrassed to speak in favour of the book. As an amateur developer describing true masters of programming, I think the exercises are not so bad. In fact, they are quite inspiring.
Iam now halfway through the book at around chapter 7. If you really take it serious, you can always find that what you're already taught should have enabled you to complete the exercise. (Though the material may not in exactly the same chapter, definitely it must have been covered.)
Perl is difficult. I do not deny that. It is because it has an underlying philosophy "There any many ways to do the same thing. I like my way, yet I don't claim mine to be THE best way." Thus it cannot be treated in the same way as some simple and structured language, like Pascal. Yet the book step by step dissects the language in an elegant way. If you have a programming background in any language, you should have no difficultly to follow through.
As long as the code is easy to read and it is straight to the point, I don't mind someone putting short statements together with multiple colons. Come'on, guys, we are not doing Cobol on 80-column punched cards.
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