While it does cover some of the topics a beginning applications programmer needs (specification, documentation, etc), and while it does cover perl, (arrays, hashes, etc), in my opinion it does not do well at introducing many of the fundamental notions of programming and computer science - dealing with complexity, fundamental algorithms, and so on. Once you're past the "how to think like an applications engineer" opening, the book walks through the features of the perl language much as Learning Perl or many of the other Perl books.

At least for my purposes, teaching an introduction to computer science as a discipline within the liberal arts, this book didn't really do the trick.