PERLBOOK(1)

📦
version 5.42.3 · 22 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44

🎀 NAME 🎀

perlbook — books about and related to Perl 💖

(yes bestie, this is the whole page, it's literally a book list and honestly? it ate. this is perlbook from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, and we're gonna go through every single entry together 🫶)

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so. There are many books on Perl and Perl-related stuff. A few of these are good, some are OK, but many aren't worth your money 😭. There is a list of these books, some with extensive reviews, at <https://www.perl.org/books/library.html> . We list some of the books here, and while listing a book implies our endorsement, don't think that not including a book means anything.

Most of these books are available online through O'Reilly Online Learning ( <https://www.oreilly.com> ).

The major reference book on Perl, written by the creator of Perl, is Programming Perl:

The Ram is a cookbook with hundreds of examples of using Perl to accomplish specific tasks:

If you want to learn the basics of Perl, you might start with the Llama book, which assumes that you already know a little about programming:

  • Learning Perl (the "Llama Book") 🦙
    • by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy
    • ISBN 978-1-4920-9495-1 [8th edition August 2021]
    • ISBN 978-1-4920-9492-0 [ebook]
    • https://www.learning-perl.com/

The tutorial started in the Llama continues in the Alpaca, which introduces the intermediate features of references, data structures, object-oriented programming, and modules:

  • Intermediate Perl (the "Alpaca Book") 🦙✨
    • by Randal L. Schwartz and brian d foy, with Tom Phoenix
    • foreword by Damian Conway
    • ISBN 978-1-4493-9309-0 [2nd edition August 2012]
    • ISBN 978-1-4493-0459-1 [ebook]
    • https://www.intermediateperl.com/

📚 References

You might want to keep these desktop references close by your keyboard:

🌈 Tutorials

🛠️ Task-Oriented

🦋 Special Topics

💸 Free (as in beer) books

Some of these books are available as free downloads. yes, actually free, no cap 🍓

🧚 Other interesting, non-Perl books

You might notice several familiar Perl concepts in this collection of ACM columns from Jon Bentley. The similarity to the title of the major Perl book (which came later) is not completely accidental 👀

  • Programming Pearls
    • by Jon Bentley
    • ISBN 978-0-201-65788-3 [2nd edition, October 1999]
  • More Programming Pearls
    • by Jon Bentley
    • ISBN 0-201-11889-0 [January 1988]

🌸 A note on freshness

Each version of Perl comes with the documentation that was current at the time of release. This poses a problem for content such as book lists. There are probably very nice books published after this list was included in your Perl release, and you can check the latest released version at <https://perldoc.perl.org/perlbook.html> .

Some of the books we've listed appear almost ancient in internet scale, but we've included those books because they still describe the current way of doing things. Not everything in Perl changes every day. Many of the beginner-level books, too, go over basic features and techniques that are still valid today. In general though, we try to limit this list to books published in the past five years.

📮 Get your book listed

If your Perl book isn't listed and you think it should be, let us know. <mailto:perl5-porters@perl.org>

bestie if you wrote a Perl book and it's not here, just email them, it's giving main character energy and they literally want to hear from you 💌

and that's the whole thing! this page ships with perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03, and that's your sign-off, mwah 💅✨ go read a Llama book, ily 🫶

📦 where this page comes from