At 108mm by 76mm you can check for yourself whether it will fit your pocket, but you"re probably meant to think of the book as a pocket into which Perl (to version 5.6) has been crammed--well, neatly folded. Vroman has done an excellent job. He summarises Perl syntax, lists and describes the built-in functions, operators and library modules. More importantly, he lists all those little things that it"s so easy to get wrong--such as operator precedence, quote types, embedded documentation rules, command line options and so on. Larry Wall, who wrote Perl as well as the foreword describes the book as "perfect". This reviewer isn"t going to disagree with the master. What Larry doesn"t say, but should have, is that every Perl programmer--from the newbie to the guru--would do well to keep a copy of Perl 5 Pocket Reference to hand. Perl isn"t a spectacularly consistent language and a small, fast aide memoire is useful to all. --Steve Patient