I have to wonder if you knew how to program OO before reading perlboot. I have a hunch you did. If so perlboot was not aimed at you. For me, however, perlboot was the first document that actually made it clear what OO was about. Other Perl-related OO documents can be very opaque in this regard.

Given the original exhortation was for Perl programmers to use OO, I'd think in that respect perlboot would be more useful than perltoot. I mean perltoot's all over the map, loaded with buzzwords, and has that awful my $class = ref($proto) || $proto; line in the constructor.

And while I might agree that perlboot is a bit heavy on the inheritance, I think it's important, especially if you find yourself doing any sort of GUI work. And if you ever go on to program in an OO language like Ruby, you will depend on inheritance for any non-trivial application. I also think the focus on methods at the beginning is great, because without useful methods an object is really just a struct or a hash.

Either way, if you ask me, perlboot succeeds marvellously at what it says it was intended to do: introduce non-OO-knowing Perl programmers to OO.