Randal Schwartz's Learning Perl (O'Reilly) also deserves mention here. It was fantastic--exactly what an introductory book for a smart audience should be. It ha

Randal Schwartz's Learning Perl (O'Reilly) also deserves mention here. It was fantastic--exactly what an introductory book for a smart audience should be. It had examples; it was informative and very clear; and it was succinct. For the most recent editions of Learning Perl, Randal Schwartz has been joined by brian d foy and Tom Phoenix. I suspect that those editions are good, too, but I haven't checked them out. It's instructive to compare Learning Perl, which was (I think) under 300 pages in its early editions, to Learning Python, which is nearly 1600 pages long in its fifth edition. There's a lot of value in the longer book---but these two books exemplify very different ideas about what an intro book should be.