I divide my world to Within-Arms-Reach and Everything-Else, and different sets of books make it into those two worlds. The close world is stuff I need to look up, so there aren't many Perl books there. The far world is the stuff I should already know.

Within-Arms-Reach

• Mastering Perl/Tk (it's a Stonehenge textbook and I'm reworking the class)
• Perl Template Toolkit (often used because I'm a Template dabbler)
• Version Control with Subversion
• Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules (three copies: it's a Stonehenge textbook and I'm heading up the rewrite)
• Cascading Style Sheets (there's funny story there, and the same story from another perspective).
• CSS Cookbook
• Programming Python
• Programming Ruby
• PostgreSQL Developer's Handbook
• Open Source Development with CVS
• PDF Hacks
• Managing Projects with make
• HTTP: The Definitive Guide (although I mostly just reference the RFC)

Everything Else

Nearby are several piles of books that only seem to be getting taller. The technical ones include:

• Pro Perl, the latest from Apress
• XML Hacks
• The Art of Assembly Language
• Beginning Perl (reviewed in TPR 1.2)
• CSS Cookbook (huh, second copy)
• Amazon Hacks
• Google Hacks
• High Performance mysql (although I've been using postgresql mostly)

Much farther away is almost every Perl book ever written, and only almost because I managed to sell a couple of the ancient ones on Amazon. I mostly keep those around so I can answer questions a Perl newbie might ask about page X in Foo.

• Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Edition
• Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition
• Learning Perl, 3rd Edition (my copy might be an earlier edition)
• CGI Programming with Perl, 2nd Edition
• Programming Perl, 3rd Edition
• The Perl CD Bookshelf, Version 3.0 (I have a Perl bookshelf, not sure what version it is, but I know it's not 4.0)
• Perl CD Bookshelf, Version 4.0 (I'm actually planning on buying this very soon)

But since I'm not actually using Perl in the workplace, there's not much sense in lugging all my Perl books in. I did toss the Perl bookshelf onto my USB flash drive, but of course I forgot that today so can't look up the version...

So I guess spending time on PM will have to do for my RDA of Perl.

Update: Whoa, nelly. Learning Perl and the Perl Bookshelf are a bit older than I thought. Learning Perl is the first edition, and the Perl Bookshelf is version 1.0. Which is, in my opinion, a good excuse to get v4.0 of the bookshelf...

I may be the odd man out here, but I don't own any perl books. ... Actually, I do own a tattered copy of the pink Camel but I doubt it's really relevant except as a historical reference ;-) Mostly, I just use the documentation that comes with perl.

However, I have the following at work for the other programmer types in the office (and I occasionally look something up):

• Learning Perl 3
• Mastering Regular Expressions 1
• Advanced Perl Programming
• Object Oriented Perl

Oh! I just remembered. I have review copies of the first "Perl Cookbook" and "Programming the Perl DBI" somewhere too.

I'm not a book freak at all. My main source of information is searchable references, like perldoc. This makes my Perl book list a rather short one. Until very recently, I owned no Perl book at all. But now, I own:

• Perl 6 Now: the Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5 (weird but inspiring book)
• Perl Medic (disappointment)
• Higher Order Perl (love it!)

• Mastering Regular Expressions (like it)
• Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd ed.

Some books I read via O'Reilly's Safari. I thought that that'd be cheaper than buying them if you read them only once, but this only works if you remember to actually use your membership. I haven't used it for months :)

I'd probably use Safari much more often if its interface didn't suck, and they fixed that stupid bug that makes == render as =  =. I wanted Safari to be able to read books on my PDA. I scraped some (against their rules, so don't do this) in order to be able to do so. Now, they provide downloads. Single chapter downloads, which is pointless for someone who mostly skims.

Perl Medic a disappointment? How so?

Perl Medic a disappointment? How so?

It doesn't quite deliver on its cover promises. Perl Medic is a good book that I would recommend to friends learning Perl, but I fail to see how it's really to do with the medic part. The part in the beginning of the book, about politics around programming in the professional world, is very valuable information one doesn't read in other places. The rest of the book appears to be written for beginning programmers, who in my opinion will benefit from a book like Beginning Perl.

I expected an advanced level book, written to help maintaining awkward legacy code. The text on the cover fortified that expectation. I also expected more examples of what one will encounter. Simple things like how for (@_) { ... } in older versions of Perl didn't check if something was read only, and that you can often fix this by simply copying the array, like so: for (my @copy = @_) { ... }. It doesn't have enough of that kind of Perl-specific advice, that is necessary to effectively deal with old and broken code you inherit.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

• Higher Order Perl
• Programming Perl
• Advanced Perl Programming
• Perl For System Administration
• CGI Programming With Perl
• Mastering Algorithms With Perl
• Extending And Embedding Perl
• Learning Perl
• Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules
• Perl Cookbook
• Object Oriented Perl
• Network Programming With Perl
• Effective Perl Programming
• Perl 6 And Parrot Essentials

You might want to look back at How Many Perl Books Do You Own? for some additional answers to a similar question.

That's back from 2001... haven't bought anything else these last few years? :-)

Privately owned

• Learning Perl (1993, 2nd or 3rd printing I think.)
• Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules
• Perl in a Nutshell
• Programming Perl
• Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason
• Mastering Regular Expressions
• Perl CD Bookshelf 3.0
  • Perl in a Nutshell
  • Learning Perl
  • Programming Perl
  • Perl Cookbook
  • Perl & XML
  • Perl & LWP
  • Mastering Perl/Tk

Company owned

• Object Oriented Perl
• Perl For System Administration
• Perl in a Nutshell
• Mastering Regular Expressions
• Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0
• Perl CD Bookshelf 4.0
  • Perl in a Nutshell
  • Mastering Regular Expressions
  • Learning Perl
  • Programming Perl
  • Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules
  • Perl Cookbook

&& an equally interesting question: which set of books would be close to sufficient for covering perl development.
|| put another way: if you could (had to!) bring 5 perl books with you on a far far away coral island, which would you pack in your luggage...
-- allan

update My own list would look like this:
(1) Learning Perl -- even tho' it's a beginners book, it's still often the first one i grab to lookup how to slice a hash or flag a file test...
(2) Programming Perl -- i wouldn't go anywhere without the bible. The book was tough to read, but haleluja! when i find myself in deep trouble, mother larry comes to me, whisper words of wisdom...
(3) Perl Cookbook -- There's so much gold in this book for everyday program problem cracking, that i've switched from browsing it to reading it, front to back, and finding new revelations every time i bend over...

Now it's getting more difficult. I choose
(4) Advanced Perl Programming -- for it's good explanations of complex data structs and persistense plus code eval and closures without which it's hard to do any serious perl programming
(5) Mastering Regular Expressions -- because at least 10% of the programming i do, is really done for me by regex'es, that's a real big gem in the perl crown.

Now of course the OO, functional (HOP), GUI (TK), comp. sci. algorithms stuff all has it's merits, but if i HAD to choose... And then again, even the most remote coral sandbank has a web connection these days, so i can always hook up to perlmonks.org and get my answers there. No sweat<g>
-- allan

Perl related:

• Programming Perl, 3rd Ed.
• Perl Cookbook, 2nd Ed.
• Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Ed.
• Mastering Perl/Tk
• Object-Oriented Perl
• Higher-Order Perl
• Extending and Embedding Perl

Arjen