No question about it, the Perl Cookbook is an educational book. Besides taking the time to educate you in Perl, it contributes a great deal to your general knowledge of trivial matters from chartreuse to shell scripts, from pluralization and grammar to mathematics and sociology (not to mention groking, grep, and race conditions). As a good educational book should, it encourages you to go outside the book itself to learn even more.

As a book "on" Perl, one of its jobs is to introduce you to Perl. It does this in a characteristically enlightened vogue. It doesn't stop at simply proliferating words on the single topic of a lesser "Perl"; it applies itself to the job of of rendering sense of the charismatic dilemma of such a poetic bit of nonsense that Mr. Wall decided to name Perl. Philosophy, nichism, and applicationitis are all thoroughly diagnosed and addressed through the rich collection of scripts (but let's call them essays) on topics ranging from ASCII to zmore, or, if you prefer, from the bottom of the big-endian byte to the top of the towering pyramid of communicative computing, the intelligent benignacious World-Wide-[Spider]Web. A natural name for such a strange form of art, describing with the gusto (you must go this far, and beyond, in order to search out the greater spirit of a work) of only the world's greatest painting (of course with a bit of slightness and meanity, but, all the same, remaining an element of the unaminous compilation of category mineralized in the Head of the tomorrow, but beginning to end the same, or else there is no difference) , a photograph of reflective magnificence and thoughtful fulfillment in essence, the Art of the greater existence and Meaning of the soulful existence of pious personality made individual by the Greater to the lesser as a being made of Being. O sophisticate, understand this if you can. In any case, however, the book retains a sense of austerity as it reaches its goal with efficiency and clarity.

The book is amazingly organized (yes, it even has an index). Learning a new computer language for the first time can be difficult, to say the least. Somehow this book seems to place all the answers for those tough questions within the first 100 pages--quite an accomplishment, considering that not many of the 700-some pages are wasted. You even learn inside jokes about Perl, such as its "official" name: not Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, rather the more delicious "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister." The authors' sense of humor is something beyond the ordinary. Their friendly argument over editor preference (emacs for Nat, vi for Tom), is oft the source for entertaining discourse (such as "I recommend coq au vi").

The point of the book is to give you information about Perl. It does this through the presentation and discussion (often animated through rich literary composition) of "recipes" for ways of using Perl to do many jobs. The approach of the book is fitting to the nature of Perl itself. It glues together so many things, just as Perl tries to glue pieces of the computer together to let you do what you want. No one tries to force you to change your programming style, or even to consider Perl as the best solution to your problems. There is a sense of humility in the writing, a refreshing change from authors who seem to consider themselves outside and above the realm of normality. Yet, if you had to seriously evaluate the standing of the authors in the community of their expertise, you would be forced to revere them--if not for their brilliance, certainly for their contribution.

Instead of being insidiously artificial in its combination of humor and logic, this book places those aspects of analogy into a strangely symbiotic relationship. The novel kind of correctness this book so beautifully promulgates is, in a manner of speaking, a Right Thing, an ideal of the artistic programmer. Through digestion, the book takes on a new shape, becoming more a commentary on a protolanguage of programmatic heuristics than an instruction book for Perl.

When reading the book, you feel it is complete in its parts. And, in each part, you find yourself almost unable to think of the book as a cold lifeless thing. Instead, there is a feeling of peerism as you share the delineation of points, rarely finding yourself offended at an attempt to qualify a certain method as categorically "best." I believe the authors know that this would simply stifle contribution to Perl, thereby stripping its evolution from the essential component of new ideas. The life of Perl is in its users, and this is understood well.

As the book says, there is more than one way to do it. Have another suggestion?