I finally finished reading my second book on Perl. Unlike Apress’ Beginning Perl, Learning Perl 5th Edition by Randal Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy is not a book for someone new to programming.
With a solid understanding of dynamic languages like PHP and Ruby, I found most of the material covered on this book very comprehensive, thus said, at times I found myself re-reading portions of the chapters just to understand concept the authors were trying to cover.

For the most part, I read this book jointly with Apress’ Beginning Perl and I found this book to have more practical real word code examples (at least if you’re a sysadmin). The most notably difference on how this book was written for someone who is new to programming with Perl, but to not new to programming are the three chapters the authors dedicate to regular expressions.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Scalar Data
Chapter 3: Lists and Arrays
Chapter 4: Subroutines
Chapter 5: Input and Output
Chapter 6: Hashes
Chapter 7: In the World of Regular Expressions
Chapter 8: Matching with Regular Expressions
Chapter 9: Processing Text with Regular Expressions
Chapter 10: More Control Structures
Chapter 11: Perl Modules
Chapter 12: File Tests
Chapter 13: Directory Operations
Chapter 14: Strings and Sorting
Chapter 15: Smart Matching and given-when
Chapter 16: Process Management
Chapter 17: Some Advanced Perl Techniques
Chapter 14 Introduction to CGI
Chapter 15: Perl and DBI

I would only suggest this book to someone with a solid knowledge of another scripting language.
Learning Perl, 5th Edition
3/5

It only took me exactly two years to read the Apress book Beginning Perl by James Lee, and I would have to admit this is the best programming book that I’ve read so far. I would need to give this book high praise as it was easy and fun to read ( pretty much taught me programming in Perl. Even tough I don’t use Perl on a daily bases, nor is Perl my prefer language of choice to write scripts ) but thanks to this book I could confidently read other programmers perl code and have an understanding on what’s going on in their program.

Chapter 1: First Steps in Perl
Chapter 2: Scalars
Chapter 3: Control Flow Constructs
Chapter 4: Lists and Arrays
Chapter 5: Hashes
Chapter 6: Subroutines/Functions
Chapter 7: Regular Expressions
Chapter 8: Files and Data
Chapter 9: String Processing
Chapter 10: Interface to the Operating System
Chapter 11: References
Chapter 12: Object-Oriented Perl
Chapter 13: Modules
Chapter 14 Introduction to CGI
Chapter 15: Perl and DBI

I would highly recommended this book to anybody starting or wanting to learn perl.
Beginning Perl, Second Edition
5/5