... by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi, John Macdonald

Klowledge of algorithms and data structures is vital for effective programming, and Perl is one of the most popular programming languages around, so this book fills a long-needed niche.

If you've ever looked at "Introduction to algorithms " by Cormen et al (CLR), this book will look familiar. It covers many of the topics covered in CLR, though not in such theoretic depth. It does, however, have mountains of Perl code implementing those algorithms.

This book can seemingly have two purposes - one is to learn algorithms (as the title suggests), and the other is to understand the implementation of algorithms in Perl.

IMHO, the authors fulfilled the second part quite well. For the first part, CLR is a excellent book and is hard to better. I don't think "Mastering algorithms" explained the topics in a clear enough way to compete with CLR, but it can indeed be a terrific companion to CLR (get the first edition, used copies cost pennies). Read about the algorith m in CLR, understand it from the pseudo-code and diagrams, then take "Mastering algorithms with Perl" and learn the Perl implementation of the algorithm.