The Eight Ball Handbook for Winners has improved my game tremendously. I am now beating more opponents by applying Schwartz's strategies. A must buy for all pool players, both beginners and advanced!

This book calls itself "Learning Perl," apparently because it is geared towards beginners. However, upon reading more and more of this book, it becomes increasingly clear that this book is not at all a learning tool, as it is a good reference for those who already learned the basics of Perl. The first chapter should be skipped over entirely if you're a beginner, because it will do nothing more than confuse you and turn you off to Perl. The subsequent chapters covers all relevant topics, but they skimp on providing descriptive key examples which would help you to better understand the concept. This book makes too many references to C and other languages, implying that you already know previous programming languages. The chapter on regular expressions is shamefully cursory and lacking in examples which can be adequately picked up by the Perl novice. The language of the text is not for the beginner user, as it throws around too many Perl-centric terms and definitions. For an intermediate, this may be sufficient, but it will not do for the beginner. I recommend Perl for Dummies as the ultimate beginner's tool. That book doesn't cover as many topics as this book, but it certainly explains conceps in a much more novice-friendly language than Learning Perl. Learning Perl makes the mistake of not keeping it simple. This is a very important teaching idea, when your expected audience are complete novices who need to have everything explained to them in basic layman's terms. This book is more of a sophisticated primer for already skilled programmers.

Before I buy this book, I was reading the reviews in this site and I was particularly concerned about the requirement of an UNIX-based OS. Since my only workstation is a PC running Windows, I was very uncertain about buying this book, despite the great review.

Now, listen up.

-I only know the basics of C++ programming;

-I do not know anything about UNIX OS;

-I create websites using HTML and JavaScripts;

-This book help me understand enough about Perl to write my own CGI scripts and run them on the Internet!!! (I've got 3 forums running now and several voting sections!)

If you are a pure Windows user, like myself, but would like to learn the basics of Perl, get this book, period!

Now the cons: As mentioned with so many reviews, this book is very brief. Although I was stuck in chapter for 1 week (!!!), I "fly" through the rest of the chapters in 2-3 days! The biggest problem I find is the lack of adequate explanation for each operators, regular expressions, etc. When writing my own CGI, I have to continuously look for alternative sources of Perl references to clear up my queries and help me to understand a few particular properties of Perl.

For example, I have to use the s///; and the tr///; many times in my scripts, but without extensive understanding of all their properties, I find it "crippling" to my work.

Enough said. For an introduction to Perl, I would give this book 5 stars. If you hunger for much more information, like myself, get this book first, before trying out the lastest Programming Perl (3rd Edition).

This is as good as it gets.

The writing style is fun throughout, the chosen examples interesting, organization very well thought out, presentation clear. You pick it up and you will keep reading.

The first chapter gives an overview of what the language can do via an example ("guess the secret word") which is developed more and more using more and more features of the language.

In your average programming book the examples are tortured and boring so that it's hard to keep reading. Not so here.
Everything is well motivated and the writing style is amusing throughout.

If you are coming from a system language background you will be hooked immediately. The ease with which many tasks are dealt with in Perl is astonishing.

The amusing style and excellent presentation is kept up in all chapters of the book. The book will give you an overview of the language and basic skills.

None of the programming books I have seen comes close to explaining basic constructs as clearly as this one. If this is your first book of first language you are very lucky.

You will feel the need for an in depth presentation. This is not a criticism of the book. What's presented here is already very powerful.
Even after 2 days I was able to write a script doing some useful work I could not otherwise have accomplished.

Perl is too rich to give an exhaustive treatment in 260 pages. You'll need Larry Wall's book also and this is clearly stated in the book.

This book makes learning Perl fun and will create a lot of fans for the language. It's the perfect entry and will keep you strongly motivated to delve deeper.

The book is definetely written for those who at least have some (or maybe a little more than just "some") programming background, and willing to learn Perl from the author of the language.

I read the first edition of the book, which was about 200 pages, or something in that range, which filled my mind with nothing but questions. Current edition, however, could answer to all of those questions (well, almost). Of course, to make it answer them I had to re-read the book four times. But none of the books I currently own (and I own quite a few) could've taken me to the innards of the language so deep no matter how many times I had read them. So the book is of value.

The Camel book, especially, does a great job on Regular Expressions and pattern matching. If you want to learn RegEx of perl in very details, you definitely need listen to the author of Perl. "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl is also a good choise, but doesn't include the latest updates.

Formats aren't covered very well though. So you might consider "The Lama book" for that ("Learning Perl"). Still, none of the books can tell you about the innards of the Perl in so much detail overall than "Programming Perl".

OOP is also toched upon in the book. Since purpose of the author is not to preach you OO lingo (but plain Perl), you'll treat that part just as an intorduction to OOP and consider "Object Oriented perl" by Damian Convey as the next text book.

I found chpater 14, "Tied variables" very helpfull though. It might remind you of DBM/Berkley DB, through the syntax

tie my %db, 'AnyDBM_File', 'my_file', O_CREAT|O_RDWR, 0664;

but unfortunately it's not about DBM at all. It is about how the "tie" function works, and teaches you how to create your own classes for implementing with "tie". After that chapter, I even had to update some of my classes and saved lots of time for their updates.

"Compiling", chapter 18 ,is a must read chapter for those who "live & breath" with Perl (like me, may be ?).

I don't want you to buy the book unless you have a good understanding of Programming or/and have knowledge of some programming languages. Otherwise, it won't help at all.

If your purpose is just to get started with Web applications, go for "CGI progamming 101" by Jacqueline Hamilton. It is a good start. But if you want to go even deeper, "Learning Perl" and "Perl Coookbook" is the next choise. Keep the "The Camel" book as the next (but definitely, not the last).

I bought this book in 1998 when I was first learning Perl. Five years later as I write this review, this book doesn't cease to be the first place I turn for help. The first part of the book does a great job of explaining Perl concepts, especially pattern matching and regular expressions (which have a book of their own). The next part, which is what I now primarily use, is the function reference. I admit I have only taken advantage of part of the book's usefulness, since I haven't done much with Perl modules, a reference to which is also included.

Plus, the authors inject just enough light humor to make your programming project bearable. :) If I didn't find my current copy so helpful already, I'd buy a newer edition.

I just started programming in Perl only 4 months or so ago. I had previously picked up some very CGI-oriented Perl books and these turned me off to the language. But _Programming Perl_ is wonderfully different, for a number of reasons:

First, it is about the language in general, not just about CGI programming. It has an excellent little introduction to the CGI:: module, but of course it also introduces you to hundreds of other useful CPAN modules.

Second, it isn't a "for dummies" book. You have to understand programs and files and loops. That said, it doesn't fall into the trap of teaching you how to translate C to Perl - it shows you the "easy" way of doing things (via hashes, OO, grep and map, etc.) without getting too caught up in the things that make other programming languages such an amazing sink of time.

Third, it teaches the idioms of Perl programming. Follow the idioms, and you'll generate readable and maintainable code.

It's not the only Perl book I own - I can also recommend Christiansen's _Perl Cookbook_ and Conway's _Object-Oriented Perl_ - but it is far and away the one I refer to the most.

The latest Niven book 'The Burning City' looked interesting, and having heard that 'Magic..' was a prequel-of-sorts, I decided to read it first.

This was my first experience with Niven and if it's representative of his body-of-work as a whole, I can see why he regularly collaborates with others...he's not very talented with the written word.

Most of this book was stilted throughout. Topping that off, it's just not horribly interesting. Perhaps we can give Niven a little credit for being one of the forerunners of the modern fantasy boom, but calling this book a classic isn't something I'll ever do.

The fact that other reviewers have remarked on its similarities to a popular children's fantasy game speaks volumes.

Here's an overview: Four magicians and a Greek soldier combine forces to find new sources of mana. Mana is what allows magicians to perform magic but it is a resource in limited supply and magicians in the past have squandered the supply away. They use the last bit of mana they can find to travel to northern Europe to find the last living god and steal its mana.

I read this book a number of years ago when I was younger. I decided to read it again because my memory of it was good. I can't say the book was bad, but it wasn't great. There were some interesting ideas about magic and the scene of travelling on a cloud still gets me excited (it sounds like fun). If you're into fantasy and magic this book is for you. It's a quick read and the version I have has fantasy drawings on almost every other page. It's almost like a fantasy comic book.

Most of Larry Niven's considerable oeuvre takes the form of the Heroic Quest,but using the vocabulary of hard science fiction. In "The Magic Goes Away", he leaves the space ships and gravity generators on the shelf, and addresses the Quest directly.
In doing so, he reveals a level of poetry of language and sensitivity of characterization that is rare in any genre, and unheard of in science fiction. "The Magic Goes Away" is in a class with "The Circus of Doctor Lao" and "Green Mansions": Small, easily-read fantasy novels that will stay in your mind forever.

More information on frauds and types would have been appreciate