I agree in spirit, mostly. In that same spirit, it’s also possible to write complex web applications with cgi-lib.pl. :P The Perl Cookbook is 21 years old and best practices have changed radically; Perl 5.4(!) was still new at the time. There is a lot of code in the book that I would be angry to find in production today.

"There is a lot of code in the book that I would be angry to find in production today"

I feel that this statement sums up how many people feel, although I've got nothing to back that up.

That said, I even suggested a relatively old book where things wouldn't be 'proper' now. What's fantastic, is that there aren't many other above-compiled languages that can state that a 21-year-old book will give you the same results then, as they would now.