I liked Perl for text parsing and that kind of work.. Used it professionally for about 3 years.
Two things i didn't like about it which i still don't
1. It's a conceptually huge language. There are several things to learn to be effective or you fall into the problem when the 10% that you use is different from the 10% that your teammates use. I found python attractive because of this.
2. I disliked Walls book. It was long winded and very hard to sit down with when I wanted to find something. I expected something like K&R but found it tedious and boring.
IMHO, Python is also huge nowadays. :( (The language itself, that is, not counting the 500K+ third-party libraries that it has nowadays.)
As for the Camel book, what I liked about it is that it explains why Perl is the way it is... the underlying philosophy. Once you know that, it starts making a lot more sense. You usually didn't get that with books like "Learn Perl in 21 days" or something.
I get that. My gold standard for technical writing was (and mostly still is), the C programming language by K&R. Brief, to the point and not missing anything. It's what I expected from the Perl book but didn't get.
regarding 2., are you sure you're referring to the Camel book and not the Llama book? To me, Programming Perl (Wall, Camel) is closer in spirit to K&R than Learning Perl (Schwartz, Llama)
Two things i didn't like about it which i still don't
1. It's a conceptually huge language. There are several things to learn to be effective or you fall into the problem when the 10% that you use is different from the 10% that your teammates use. I found python attractive because of this.
2. I disliked Walls book. It was long winded and very hard to sit down with when I wanted to find something. I expected something like K&R but found it tedious and boring.