My three favourite Perl books:

1. Camel (Programming Perl)
2. Shiny Ball (Effective Perl Programming)
3. Staghound (Perl Best Practices)

See also:

• perl.org free online Perl books
• Book Reviews (Perl Monks Book Reviews section)

For a long list of links for getting started with Perl see:

• Re: Online Tutorial To Get Started (Learning Perl References)

Extra Book References Added Later

Some Perl book lists:

• learn.perl.org - basic book list (see especially Learning Perl by merlyn)
• perl.org - longer book list (all books mostly free)
• 50 Best Perl Books of All Time - bookauthority.org (suspect commercial Perl book list)

Some Perl book and other recommendations:

• Modern Perl - by chromatic, fantastic free intro to Perl for decent programmers who are not familiar with perl (Modern Perl book web site by chromatic (updated for perl 5.22, 2016) is on an indefinite hiatus)
• perlmaven (by szabgab - lots of good free stuff here)
• Perl Taster (Kindle) (by davorg - not free but very cheap)

• Effective Perl Programming by brian d foy et al
• Minimal Perl by Tim Maher

PM Nodes Discussing Books

• Modern Perl: The Book: The Draft by chromatic (2010)

• thread where chromatic and xdg compare Perl books
• Best Perl Books of All Time
• If I could only own one Perl book, it would be:
• Which Book
• Book question
• So what is your Perl book "Trilogy" anyway?

• Books to master Perl, LAMP and web development
• Network Programming with Perl Book Recommendation
• What book would be valuable to someone self-taught?
• New Beginning Perl book due out in August
• Perl Videos and Book (followed by re-asking in Perl Book OOPS)
• Suggestions for getting a more solid understanding of Perl
• Please guide me regarding good books/resources on data structures and algorithms
• Seeking guidance on getting better at Perl.
• Perl Recommended Reads
• Need a Book for System Administration with Modern Perl Concepts
• Are these Perl Textbooks Good?
• Moving from scripting to programming

• Perl books
• good perl book
• Perl books I'd like to have.
• Unwritten Perl Books: 2007 version
• Recommended Reading

• Re^5: Why so much hate? by xdg (a technical reviewer for Intermediate Perl)
• Good Perl book?
• Should I go back to basics of keep moving on?
• Which is best book to start learning Object Oriented Perl?

• Any other good perl books (2019)
• Re: Old Programmer New To Perl (2020)
• Re^2: Old Programmer New To Perl (2020)
• Beginning Perl (Ovid) Vs Learning Perl? (2020)
• latest perl book. (follow up by anonymous author of previous Beginning Perl v Learning Perl question?)
• Re^6: Unicode issues with emc uemcli and Re: RFC: Perl Learning Plan (pritesh_ugrankar praises Beginning Perl by Ovid)

• Perl tutorial building on Python skills? (lots of useful tangential discussion of Perl books in this 2021 thread)
• Beginner Recommendations by Ookma-Kyi (2023)

• Is Programming Perl still relevant as a reference book? by vrk (2007)
• (Perl) Programming Books like the Camel Book by amarquis (2007)
• Who still uses the camel book? by starX (2023)

• Two Different Languages: Two Similar Books (PBP and CCS) by me (2005) - compares and contrasts Perl Best Practices book with C++ Coding Standards book

• Perl Best Practices -- 20 years later (2025) by pfaut - Perl::Critic and Perl::Critic::Community discussed in replies

See Also

• Re: I need perl coding standards (Coding Standards References)

Update: Added more references