I got this book some time ago, and had very high expectations of it - I had some non-Perl ORA books by then. I was however dissapointed with the book.

It's not a bad book, it's just not a great book. I also agree with dze27 it's clear that the book was ported to NT from Unix, and in some places it shows. As mentioned this may or may not be a problem depending on how you think.

My main critisim is I think, poor editing, the book repeates it's self in several places, and this makes the book tiring to read at times. Code examples are also not laid out in the best possible format.

The book is also getting a little dated now, and ActiveState (love'm or hate'm) have made major improvments to ActivePerl since this book was written.

I'd have to say until a new edition is produced, I'd look else where now for an introductory Perl text, say Elements of Programming with Perl or the new edition of Learning Perl.