This is certainly a superb book. I really enjoyed it. Here are some of the advantages of "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" over other entry level general purpose Perl books such as "Learning Perl".
(1) Most importantly, you learn Perl in the context of dealing with biological problems (e.g., parsing BLAST output) rather than general problems that will not even remotly interest you (e.g., parsing employee's address list). So you will be kept interested throughout the book.
(2) Entire codes, rather than code snippets, are presented.
(3) Explanations are much more friendly and clear.
(4) You can find some useful materials that are not covered in Learning Perl; for example, using Perl debugger, using range operator to skip lines, etc.
One problem with this book is that there are TONS of errata (I'm referring to October 2001, 1st edition). Most of their corrections are available from the book website, and half of them are re-phrasing of sentences, so errata will not prevent you from understanding the book. But it certainly takes significant amount of time to go through the HUGE list of errata corrections (I also found more than ten additional errata that are not found in the errata list and reported to publisher). So if it's not urgent for you, wait until next reprint becomes available.
One more wish list is that Bioperl module could have been covered (It is briefly mentioned over seven pages but not actually covered). Hopefully, the upcoming book (June 2003) "Mastering perl for bioinformatics" will cover it.
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