PERLBOOK(1perl)

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version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
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💖 NAME 💖

perlbook — books about Perl and books that live next door to Perl 🎀📚

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so, there are so many books on Perl and Perl-adjacent stuff. some of them are genuinely good, some are fine, and ngl a bunch of them are not worth your money 💀. there's a whole list of these books — some with full extensive reviews — over at https://www.perl.org/books/library.html. we're listing some of them here too, and like… being listed is kind of our endorsement, but do not read the absence of a book as meaning anything. it doesn't. bestie it literally doesn't.

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

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

The Ram is a cookbook — hundreds of examples of using Perl to get specific tasks done 🍜:

if you wanna learn the basics of Perl, you might start with the Llama book — it assumes 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 that starts in the Llama keeps going in the Alpaca 🦙➡️🦙, which introduces the intermediate stuff: 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 📌

these are the ones you want sitting right next to your keyboard, fr fr 👑

🌸 Tutorials 🌸

🛠️ Task-Oriented 🛠️

🦋 Special Topics 🦋

🍓 Free (as in beer) books 🍓

some of these books are available as free downloads. free!!! 💖

🧚 Other interesting, non-Perl books 🧚

you might notice a few familiar Perl concepts hanging out in this collection of ACM columns from Jon Bentley 👀 the similarity to the title of the major Perl book (which came later, bestie) 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 ships with the documentation that was current at the time of release. which is kind of a problem for content like a book list 📚😭 there are probably really nice books published after this list got baked into your Perl release, so you can always check the latest released version at https://perldoc.perl.org/perlbook.html.

some of the books we've listed look almost ancient on the internet scale of things, but we included them because they still describe the current way of doing things. not everything in Perl changes every single day, no cap. a lot of the beginner-level books also go over basic features and techniques that are still valid today. in general though, we try to keep this list limited 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 🫶 perl5-porters@perl.org — actually, mailto:perl5-porters@perl.org if you're clicking.

also quick heads-up bestie: this page was written by the Perl 5 Porters for the Perl v5.44.0 release, dated 2026-10-17 💅 that's the version you're reading right now. go read a book. any book. preferably one from this list 🎀✨
📦 where this page comes from