This book is thorough in its knowledge, easy to read, with good references, and very well outlined and organized. It takes the reader and aspiring PERL / CGI Programmer from scratch to the point where he or she will be fully capable of writing their own fully functional and interactive PERl-CGI based web site in a UNIX/LINUX/Windows platform in a matter of a couple of weeks. I covers all of the necessary topics such as parameters, functions, variables, lists and arrays, sub routines, forms, writing and reading to files, and much more. It also provides a solid foundation to jump into the more advanced topics in PERL and CGI programming. I am very pleased with this introduction to PERL and highly recomend this book to anyone who already knows html and other programming languages and would like to add PERL to their tools list. This is an academic treatment of PERL although not a scientific one.