Intermediate Perl by Randal L. Schwartz, brian d foy, Tom Phoenix

When you would like to start as programmer, Perl is the good program for learning and using with your System. You can write it as script or use it with Application Server. If you are a newbie for Perl. You can start your learning with "Learning Perl" book.

After you learned and worked a few time with perl and you are looking for Perl Book. I mention Intermediate Perl, 2nd Edition Beyond The Basics of Learning Perl By Randal L. Schwartz, brian d foy, Tom Phoenix. It's good, isn't it? I think it's better you read from Sample.

Before you start with this book, you are supposed to know and have some experience with Perl. You can check topics from link.

Topics include:
Packages and namespaces
References and scoping, including regular expression references
Manipulating complex data structures
Object-oriented programming
Writing and using modules
Testing Perl code
Contributing to CPAN

Each chapter isn't long, you can spend a few hour to read. That's good, because you will feel bored when you read it. That's not big deal to make it interesting. I like this book when I finished each chapter, I can do Exercise and then check an answer in Appendix. You are supposed to do Exercise also, that will helpful for you to understand each chapter. In the book, it's easy to read  because they arrange paragraph to explain each code and example. I read it on epub format, that's very good. They use color with code examples and pictures.
About topics in this book, You can check from above paragraph, they are quite difficult, but they are important topics for Perl programming. However, I was able to learn from authors's idea in a book. One thing for readers, you are supposed to know basics of Perl.
When you read this book, you don't necessary need to read from first chapter to last chapter. You can read from which topic you interested.
However, the book will help you to figure out some issue and it's a clue sometimes. But it will better, if you find out more in the internet. In this book, it refers to many links you can use.

By the way you can check http://www.intermediateperl.com for this book.