I started to learn Perl very recently, and the only free Perl book I found was Beginning Perl by Simon Cozen.

It was a wrox book, and from what I heard (slashdot comments) wrox book are not usually good, plus Simon's picture on the cover gave me the wrong impression. (Too young)

Anyway, I was between should I risk my time reading this book, or should I risk my money and buy a famous one (mostly it would have been Learning Perl, or Programming Perl).

Anyway I decided to investigate (search) after Simon, and to my surprise he turned out to be an impressive guy.

He write frequently about Perl he wrote a second Perl book (the one you are talking about), he is responsible for maypole, which is arguably a better concept than catalyst.
why? because I think I agree with Tony Bowden that frameworks are hard. I add that open source software being free, reduce some abstractions need, because there is no single vendor to which you are afraid to be tied, don't abstract to be politically correct, I don't mind framework that are strongly couple to specific implementation and technologies like OpenACS which require aolserver and Postgresql.

And on another point I heard Sebastian that the main guy behind catalyst is a fan of multiple inherentance, and I don't like interitance in general, single or multiple.

Anyway, back to the point, Simon Cozen is ok, you can trust he has done a good job, and don't take my word look at his other work, writings.
You may also want to read this interview with him.

And finally, good luck studying

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