I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner....
Really? You wouldn't recommend it to a beginner? I might, depending on the circumstances.
I think it boils down to
- How people learn best, and
- What situation they're learning Perl in.
My first job coding in perl was a matter of picking apart code and understanding it; I had to do that before I could even think about refactoring, rewriting as modules, etc. I was pretty much just thrown into it, and expected to pick it up and troubleshoot things quickly. In this case, I found Perl in a Nutshell a godsend, as I could get quick answers to questions like, "What does the =~ do?" or "How do I assign values to a hash?". Oh, and the Perl Cookbook was nice, too, for that. Since I also learn better by examples, I found these very useful.
As my interest in Perl grew and I had more time to think and learn about *why* things were the way they were, and I also realized the code I was working with was pretty monolithic, with little or no use of modules, I found the Camel to be more useful. PBP wasn't around for me then, but I think it'd be somewhere in between - it's a good balance of examples and explaining of *why*.
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As always, YMMV. I would not recommend this book to a beginner, because I did not find it useful when I was a beginner (more so than now). It often relied on the reader understanding things that I had not yet learned, and that I was not readily able to learn from that book. Others, no doubt, have had different experiences. Those more intelligent (or more code-savvy) than I am would perhaps find the book more useful, even as beginners.
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