Yes - this is VERY late to this party, but, this code should be relevant for reference.

I liked injunjoel's streightforward code, but I wanted to simplify it, and make special cases stand out. I also dislike handling special cases inside sort routines, because these are called more often than the number of items to be sorted. I also believe I have minimized the number of loops.

The only part I am not happy with is the "Special Marker" that is passed into the sort. That is a compromise made in order to simplify the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @things_to_sort = (
                   { author => 'bart', title => 'skateboarding' },
                   { author => 'lisa', title => 'postmodernism' },
                   { author => 'marge', title => 'hairstyles' },
                   { author => 'lisa', title => 'THIS BOOK FIRST' },
                   { author => 'homer', title => 'donuts' },
                   { author => 'lisa', title => 'Eating Veggies' },
                   { author => 'bart', title => 'coolness' }
                  );
#this begs for a new structure.
#lets use a hash.
my (%authors_books,  $FirstAuth);
my $FirstTitle = "THIS BOOK FIRST";
my $Special_Low_Sort_Marker = "0x00" x 100; # A hundred nulls

#turn your AoH's into a HoA's
#Find first Author
#Mark Specially-named books
#see perldsc for reference
foreach (@things_to_sort){
    if ( $_->{title} eq $FirstTitle){
       $FirstAuth =  $_->{author} ;
       push @{$authors_books{ $_->{author} }},
            $Special_Low_Sort_Marker . $_->{title}; # Special Marker -
+ Push to top of SORT
    }else{
         push @{$authors_books{ $_->{author} }},    $_->{title};
    }  
}

#display the information.
if ($FirstAuth){
  PrintAuthor($FirstAuth);
  delete $authors_books{$FirstAuth};
}
foreach my $author ( sort keys %authors_books){
    PrintAuthor($author);
}
########################
sub PrintAuthor{
  my $author = shift;
  print "$author books:\n";
  foreach (sort @{$authors_books{$author}}){
       s/^$Special_Low_Sort_Marker//;     # Remove Special marker
       print "\t$_\n";
  }
}
[download]

I added an extra data line, to ensure that sorting was alpha, according the OP's spec. The output:

lisa books:
        THIS BOOK FIRST
        Eating Veggies
        postmodernism
bart books:
        coolness
        skateboarding
homer books:
        donuts
marge books:
        hairstyles
[download]

Extending this to allow Multiple "First Authors" is left as an exercise for the reader.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.