Written by Steve Holzner, former contributing editor for PC Magazine and the author of 50 computer books. There are over a million copies of his books in print. Includes 250 pages of CGI programming, the driving force behind Perl's popularity. Includes over 1,000 programming examples. Comprehensive coverage of Perl syntax and programming. If you can have only one book on Perl, this is it! Written at a higher technical level than other books currently on the market.
I used this book to learn PERL for my first job out of college. After reading the book, I never had a problem with anything I needed with Perl, including some work in very diverse areas. There's information to get you started with a variety of topics, including database work, web programming, all sorts of things. If you're interested in learning Perl, this is definitely not a bad choice.