Yes, that book is great. Just a joke about Perl's relative syntactic obscurity. I love me some Perl because of the elegance and power the operators provide me, but its murder on a noob, especially if its not great code.
In five or ten years there'll be some other language fad, and those languages will get their turn at being the whipping boy.
Or... maybe there's a kernel of truth in it? Yes, all languages have weird gotchas and corner cases. But there are times when Perl seems to go out of its way to have as many as it can manage, which turns the process of learning Perl into a long campaign of trial-and-error experiments and rote memorization.
It's sort of like trying to find a consistent pattern in the naming of PHP's built-in functions, except it applies to the entire language.
The Perl Best Practices book is needed for all teams (it saves on long discussions; "this page list what we do different to PBP").
Maybe Perl wouldn't make for the ideal first language, but it's certainly not nearly as difficult as assembly, certain functional languages, or even C/C++.
I don't know about that. I think a large reason for the fan boys' FUD against Perl is that the three languages are quite similar. Competition.
Edit: What I mean is, the coming new languages will probably be quite different and fill different ecological niches.
You can make a good argument that today with Moose/CPAN etc, Perl 5 is hard-to-beat as a development environment. The main disadvantage IMHO is that it is a lot to learn.
I really don't know what good can be said about PHP though, which is eating all three's lunch. (-: What was Larry Wall's quote? "Takes worse is better to new depths". :-)
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...