Rating: 

Weak points that really brought book down:
1. Examples needed improvement: more O'Reilly humour; more examples with greater depth (ie using many classes); fewer unfinished examples.
2. Where's the I/O? This is one of the first things that a programmer wants to learn. But it's buried, and poorly demonstrated, halfway through the book.
3. The writing is too tangled. Even as an experienced programmer, I read some lines and was left with "huh??". I agree with other readers that this book isn't for beginners.
4. Some sections are too wordy. E.g. the garbage collection section includes a whole paragraph of rhetoric on 'state-of-the-art techniques', then tells us not to worry ourselves about it (What's the algorithm?!).

So yeah, a decent book. Not its fault that Perl is just so much better... :)