Rating:  - A hard book to rate
This book is extremely difficult to rate because it has some major strengths and also some major weaknesses. I could pretty much give this book a rating anywhere between 1 and 5 stars and justify it. That being said, I have learned a lot of perl through reading the book & doing the excellent exercises that are provided (with answers), therefore it deserves a decent rating despite its faults.
The book is an overview of the language, not a reference. It's a tutorial that takes you through the major language features. Some of the chapters are regular expressions, filehandles, formats, hashes, functions, etc. The writing is generally clear and accessible and the examples are very well done. Most people should feel comfortable using perl after working through this book.
The real failing of the book is that it is pitched as a Win32 book but it is full of UNIX-centric examples and idioms. The chapter on DBM is likely to go unused by almost every Windows programmer and there is not much coverage of OLE automation/COM/ActiveX, which is key to Windows. The book would also have benefitted from a look at Windows system administration tasks and how to automate these with perl.
Another minor frustration is the "Topics We Didn't Mention" appendix. This book is only 220 pages + appendices, index, forewords and there could easily have been room for discussing those topics (like basic networking, security, the compiler).
In short, it's a good book to learn perl with if you're stuck using NT at work like me. That being said, the book is rough around the edges and could be polished significantly in a future edition.
Rating:  - O'Right - O'Reilly!
This is a great place to start learning Perl. As a first exposure to THE standard text-processing language of the web, this is as good as you will find.
I think some of the reviewers who rated the book lower were probably discouraged with the learning curve of the language more than the quality of the material.
Save money and buy the Perl CD Bookshelf (also O'Reilly), which includes Learning Perl on Win32.
Rating: - An excellent introduction to Perl on Windows systems
If you do not use a Unix system, and are interested in Perl, this is the book you should go for. It provides an entertaining and thorough stroll through the language. There are a lot of little differences between this book and the other 'Learning Perl'. If you want to make special use of the Windows GUI, you should check this book out. Combined with the reference work 'Programming Perl', you will have everything you need to become proficient at the language. Highly recommended for both amateur and professional programmers.
Rating: - Great book for picking up Perl
It is a very useful book that covers many useful aspects. It does so quickly, without that filler that many books like to have to make themselves thicker. If you've never done programming or scripting, you might get lost in the first chapter (for example, there are nested conditional loops on page 14). Luckily, the later chapters go on to explain all of this.
You get some real juice, too: file/directory manipulation, handling processes, registry editing, database connectivity. It definitely gets your feet wet with what you can do with Perl.
Rating: - Excellent Book
The O'Reilly books are definately THE books to get if you are interested in Perl. The two Learning Perl books (Unix and Win32) are easy to read and understand and great for a person first learning Perl. The Perl Cookbook is incredibly useful for someone trying to figure out how to do some of the more advanced things. I wish there were books like this for Java. This book, although it says win32, can be applied to Unix. At least about 95% of it is transferrable to Unix. Perl is an interpreted language, therefore it is Platform independent except when you make system specific calls to the OS.
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