It's a really good book. It teaches programming using Perl as its language of choice. The drawback is that once you get through it, it's not much of a reference. It is most certainly geared for the beginner programmer, although, I have to admit, it has some nuggets in there for an old miner, too. I think of all the books I've bought on Perl (And I think I should own a bit of O'reilly) So far the book I've enjoyed the most has been Object Oriented Perl. It's not really a beginner's book though. The Programming Perl Book is more of a reference manual than a tutorial. For an introduction to the language, Elements of Programming is probably the best of the beginners books I've looked at. (I won't look at the dummies books. I find their titles insulting... absolutely a marketing ploy).