I bought it immediately when it was released, and took several months trying to study it. Finally, in the chapter about parsers, I got the feeling of being overwhelmed. I simply couldn't understand what was going on when and why anymore.

So I thought: this book is surely great for studying how to do this kind of stuff in Perl, but maybe not so great for teaching you this stuff if in general if you have no background other than procedural programming.

So I decided to put it on the shelf for now and try to learn CL and Scheme first and maybe Mozart and/or Haskell later on. Currently I'm working through "Practical Common Lisp" and "The Little Schemer" and hope to get more comfortable with this approach to programming.