The first edition of this book was published in 2000, and it is still freely available online (http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/). The second edition was published in 2004. This much-needed third edition is based on Perl version 5.10.1, which is available with many of the latest Linux distributions.

The book maintains the second edition’s layout: it starts with the “Hello World” programs that are usually shown in an introductory chapter, and it ends with an excellent discussion of Perl and the database independent (DBI) module in chapter 15.

Some of the introductory code snippets are identical to those shown in chapter 1 of the first edition. For example, print 06301;, while syntactically correct, may be somewhat misleading to a beginning student because it places the output directly in front of the shell prompt and may not be seen immediately.

There is also a problem with the example given in the discussion of the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). The example shows cpan[1]>install DBD::mysql, and it does not work easily within CPAN. The correct way of installing this module with a newer Linux distribution is through a package manager such as deb or RPM.

Overall, this is an excellent introductory book for Perl novices, although it may be too fast paced for somebody who has never written a line of code. It is also an excellent reference manual for readers who are familiar with Perl and want to quickly overview a forgotten programming concept. The book is a good, comprehensive introduction to the Perl scripting language.