Rating:  - Great beginners book!
This is the book that I used to teach myself Perl.
I was able to breeze through it in 3 days, not 21 days and I would recommend the Teach Yourself series by SAMS to anyone who wants to learn a computer language.
Later when you need a big reference book, I would recommend "Programming Perl" by O'Reilly.
Rating: - A great introduction to the language
I was able to quickly learn the basics of the language from this book. It is well laid out, gives many clear examples, shows a lot of useful things you can do with the language. I have grown beyond this, but still use it as my first reference when I forget basic stuff.
The O'Reilly books are wonderful too, but I would recommend getting them after you have worked through this book. They do a better job explaining why, but this book is great for jumping into the how.
Also has a very good introduction to CGI, cookies and Perl philosophy.
Rating: - Great companion for a Perl/CGI course
I am currently using this book as a companion for my Perl/CGI course. It is an excellant book. When I have problems understanding what the professor talks about in class, I just come home and go over the similar topics in the book. If you are a student planning on taking a Perl/CGI course, you should purchase this book.
Rating: - A great book for learning perl.
This book is a very useful book for learning perl. It is a beginning book for people willing to learn a new language. Obviously, if you read the title it will be for people who want to learn perl.
This book is a great way to jump start learning perl. After reading this book, I would recommend getting other perl books from O'Reilly, but this is the best beginner perl book I have seen.
Rating:  - do not buy this book
While I am not personally familiar with David Till, the author of Sams Teach Yourself Perl5 in 21 Days, I've drawn many conclusions about the man, few of them complimentary. I borrowed the book from one of our web designers and decided to teach myself Perl. I have no previous programming experience per se, but I have six years experience working on the networking/maintenance side of computers, and have a decent knowledge of batch writing and OS's.
At first it seemed like a great book. My only original complaint was Till's writing, which is at best clumsy and at worst confusing. Still, I plowed through into the fifth day. There, the programming examples given begin to resemble the writing: clumsy, confusing, and -- what is poison for a coding manual -- illogical. One of his examples takes 100 calculations to generate 10 numbers, and fails to meet his own criteria. This broke my faith in the book, but I continued until I found two other programs given as answers that simply don't work.
That's unacceptable for a programming tutorial. I've switched to O'Reilly's Learning Perl, which is much better written and provides sound code. If you're just a beginner, learning how to program is hard enough without your tutorial working against you. Do not buy this book.
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