This is the classic reference to the Perl language, commonly known as "The Camel Book", after the camel on its cover. This book is highly readable, funny, and covers the entire Perl 5.14.x language with all of its fine points.

It is highly recommended as a book to read after you know your way around the core Perl language, so you can learn much more about it, and enjoy its many jokes.

This book gives a long list of tasks to be accomplished and recipes that accomplish them. By looking at the recipes one can learn more about Perl and also know how to accomplish many common tasks in Perl.

This book (whose text is available online on its site) covers functional programming techniques using Perl and “transforming programs with programs”. It covers such topics as closures, iterators, tokenising, and parsing.

"Perl Best Practices" covers the author's opinion of what should be done when writing Perl programs, and what should not be done. It covers all levels of the Perl language. Some of the advice given in the book is controversial, and you should still judge it according to your style and preferences, but it's still gives a lot of good advice, and a lot of food for thought and consideration.

For more discussion of this book refer to:

• "Perl Best Practices Module Recommendation Commentary"
• Perl.com feature inspired by the book.

Our own take of a comprehensive document for Perl best practices can be found at the “Perl Elements to Avoid” page.

• The book “Writing Perl Modules for CPAN” has been largely superseded by the page “RFC: How to Release Modules on CPAN in 2011” by “ELISHEVA” on Perlmonks. Also see our dedicated CPAN page.

• The book “Object Oriented Perl” by Damian Conway covers old techniques that are now better done using the Moose and Moo ecosystems on CPAN. See our dedicated page about Object Oriented Programming in Perl for more information.