Perl 5 How-To: The Definite Perl Programming Problem-Solver, with CDROM

I just bought this book today after much Perl book researching. This book is well organized/layed out and every example shows how to accomplish a real world task. Normally I go for the O'Reilly books, but this book illustrates how to do so much (dynamic HTML, sockets, forking processes, etc.) in one volume. I do wish that the book did touch more on SQL database access modules. Very happy I found this book.

There are a lot of apparent printing errors in this book. They might have not done proofreading at all. First 4 authors (of totally 6) have no contact information. The evaluation form is not postage-paid or mailable. Can only be used as a supplemental reference book.

This book is clear, well-organized, and has many useful examples, but the authors did not check their examples on Windows 95 systems. For instance, and this is not a minor point, they say that you can run command lines under DOS in the same way you can under Unix. Not true! Even something as simple as perl -e 'print "hello";' will not work. Because of this, the book would be far more useful for those working on Unix systems than for those using Windows. I am not sure if there is a better book available, but "Perl 5 Unleashed" does have the correct information on command lines.

This book covers the more popular and usefull areas of Perl. The book contains great examples of how to use/do various things within Perl. Also all examples are real-world based. This is my most used Perl book in my collection, by far