Is it supposed to be a tutorial book? I always thought that it was trying (and epically succeeding) to be a massive reference.
I know O'Reilly has the llama and alpacas that are intended to be the actual tutorials, though I can't really speak for their quality (I actually did learn Perl via Camel Book + external projects).
I learned Perl by reading Learning Perl, but even trying to use Programming Perl as a reference since then has been difficult for me. The book is conversational and humorous in its tone, which makes it extremely verbose and irritating to read when I'm actually trying to get information out of it. There's too much raw text and not enough examples, particularly when it comes to syntax. I also find that because the book attempts to be a complete reference, and because Perl at its core is insanely complicated, Programming Perl (like the Perl online documentation) spends far too much time dwelling on minor technical details and edge cases which no sane coder should ever be thinking about using.
I'd say it's somewhere in between; it starts with a single-chapter overview that shows enough Perl that you can start writing programs, and there's definitely a progression through the chapters, but it's also got a pretty thorough coverage of the whole language (at the time of writing).
