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			  Suggested Reading

... oh, and some suggested reading material, all from O'Reilly:

     CGI Programming on the World Wide Web
     Learning Perl ("the LLama Book")
     Programming Perl ("the Camel Book")
     Advanced Perl Programming ("the Panther Book")
     Perl Cookbook ("the Ram book" - actually a Bighorn sheep)
     Mastering Regular Expressions ("the Owl book")
     Web Client Programming In Perl ("the Frog book")

I have listed them roughly in my suggested reading order, although
there are a lot of caveats.

CGI Programming is done in Perl and makes some allowances that you
might not know Perl, but I highly recommend that you get either
Learning Perl or Programming Perl at the same time.  Or both.

Learning Perl takes a more lesson-by-lesson approach to the topic, but
is *not* geared towards learning Perl for CGI stuff. (Note:  It's also
been reported to have a lot of errors;  check the O'Reilly site for
errata and see if there's a more recent printing).

Programming Perl is more reference-oriented and generally strongly
suggested by anybody with a lot of programming experience.  It's the
"bible" of the Perl language.  Co-authored by the creator of Perl
himself!

Advanced Perl Programming is pretty good.  Don't let the title prevent
you from cracking it open before you finish Programming Perl, however.
The first five chapters explain a lot of things about data structures,
references, subroutines, closures, and using eval that Programming
Perl seems to take for granted.  I think I'd have had a lot easier of
a time with Perl if I'd had those five chapters around when I started
really doing interesting stuff with data.

The Perl Cookbook is one of the most recent additions to O'Reilly's
Perl books.  It's just what the title says; a THICK (about 750 pages)
volume of problem/solution examples, along with sample code and
discussions of the issues involved.  Look for me on page XXXII, near
the bottom :-).

Mastering Regular Expressions is highly recommended by just about
everybody involved with the other Perl books on this list.  I haven't
read it myself, but then again I've been using regular expressions in
Emacs since forever, so I'm less intimidated by them. I *still* plan
to get a copy of this book someday soon, so I can really understand
and use regular expressions.  One of my friends, also one of the guys
who helped me over some rough spots early in my Perl adventure, told
me "In Perl, If you can do it with a regular expression, that's
probably the right way."

I skimmed through Web Client Programming in Perl and I was fairly
impressed; it's a slim book but looks well worth having.  This is for
doing things where you want to make automated programs that interact
with web servers.  Perl has some powerful libraries for making doing
things over the net as easy and flexible as doing things with local
files.  For some complex tasks, this could be *really* handy to have
around.

I haven't looked at, nor have I heard opinions from anyone, the Perl
Resource Kit, the Perl reference, Perl in a Nutshell.  I'd like to
hear from anybody who has things to say about them.

Also been recommended to read (but haven't yet):
     Effective Perl Programming (Addison-Wesley)
     Perl:  The Programmer's Companion (John Wiley & Sons)

In the preface to Perl Cookbook, the authors suggest Perl: The
Programmer's Companion is good for experienced programmers who're
getting into Perl, while Effective Perl Programming is about the
object module, developing modules, debugging, and CPAN.

Addendum: had time to read most of Effective Perl Programming.
There's a lot of stuff about idomatic Perl.  Since a lot of the time
this works out to be the same as "obfuscated Perl" I didn't find the
material as directly useful as I'd like, but I still think it's good
reading for moderate-to-advanced Perl programmers.  It's always a good
idea to have a solid grasp of the nuances of the language, even if you
don't plan to use them :-).