It's another one of those useful blue O'Reilly books with an animal on the front. A wolf, in this case. This one starts with basic data structures in Perl and then presents reusable algorithms of increasing complexity. The authors intend it for two types of readers: "...those who want to cut and paste solutions and those who want to hone their programming skills." Attempting to serve both audiences, the authors attempt to be both practical and theoretical.

The book begins with basic and advanced data structures. The next series of chapters each address basic programming tasks such as sorting, searching, and working with sets, matrices, graphs, and strings. The final set of chapters is organized by topic area, covering geometric algorithms, number systems, number theory, cryptography, probability, statistics, and numerical analysis. A concluding appendix suggests additional readings.

The format and quality are familiar to readers of other O'Reilly books. It is a good, readable exploration of algorithms implemented in Perl. You will need to get the latest version of Perl on your own. No problems with that, either.