Item Description: Must have Beginner Book.

Review Synopsis: This book almost reads the questions that pop up in your mind as you read.

To state that this is an amazing book will be an understatement. There are a lot of good books out there for learning Perl, but here's why the book stands out:

When the author(s) explain how to iterate through the elements of a list using the the "foreach" statement, they explain how a variable is needed to hold each element of the list. So while I was reading it, I thought "hmmm...does this hold a copy of the element or what?"....and the next sentences are "The control variable is not a copy of the list element—it actually is the list element. That is, if you modify the control variable inside the loop, you modify the element itself,as shown in the following code snippet." and then it shows it. There are many such instances that makes this book truly stand out.

The footnotes are good. In fact they are too good to be footnotes. For example, in the footnotes, I found about the "$^E" that I can add to a "die" statement, and that gave amazingly clear information. Please do not dispense them as "just there" kind of footnotes. They are amazingly informative.

End of Chapter exercises is another excellent point. Some of the exercises are straight off, but once you write the script ask they ask you to, you go "wow, that's great"...others make you think, rethink, reread, rewrite the script, but they are really really worth it.

Regular Expressions are spread across three chapters, and they are a must read.

And most importantly, it will enable you to be productive real fast. I am just about halfway through this book, but have already written some scripts that helped automate stuff at work. And I have very basic prior programming experience.

If you are a beginner, please get a copy of this book. You'll be amazed at the stuff that you can learn.