Programming the Perl DBI, by Alligator Descartes, Tim Bunce, Linda Mui (Editor)

I started using Perl with databases a couple years back with a small project. I was discouraged to realize that the only documentation I could find was in the perl docs themselves, which were as dry as most docs, and sometimes as hard to read as your average man page. I knew this book existed, but held off getting a copy and struggled through beginning to learn Perl DBI.

When I did aquire this book, I knew the basics. I was able to flip through the first bits of the book and was pleased with how it was laid out. It had all the wealth of information that the perl docs had, but was less confusing to me. And it was a book I could hold and scribble notes in, something I was unable to do with the perl docs (I don't have the resources to print them all out, afterall.

I would recommend that the reader has a fairly solid base in Perl before picking up this book, as they don't spend time on the Perl Basics (I suggest O'Reilly's Programming Perl and Learning Perl for this). But other than that, as far as I'm concerned it's the best Perl DBI book on the market.