On the face of it, the subject matter leads a lot to be desired. Perl is not the best choice of language for the sorts of operations that graphics seem to require.
As the author notes, however ,the ability to leverage meaty XS extensions allows Perl to gain much of the low-level power and speed of C. This enables the Perl module-writer to compensate for the overly-meta way in which Perl often deals with binary data.
For the most part, Verbruggen deals with his subject matter very well. The opening chapters cover basic graphics concepts, colour spaces, formats, etc and help set the tone for the rest. It is clear that this book is intended as a jumping-off point and a cookbook, rather than a reference guide or authorative tome.This is something of a shame as Verbruggen's style is open and easy to read, so a reference section written by him would likely have been readable and usable.
In addition, much of the focus is around web-based graphics but that surely just reflects the needs of its target audience. Virtually all of the second part of the book is taken up with discussing the sort of effects and graphics creation a web programmer might want to achieve.
In practice, on reading it, I found quite a bit of the coverage to be somewhat superficial. The major models have their simple operations well-covered, but there was little of the special knowledge or detail of the quirks and secrets that can really mark a tech book out as very special.
On the upside, the issues of version numbering and nasty dependency hell (which have often beset my oiwn experiences with Perl and graphics) are very well-handled and would doubtless save a less-experienced programmer a lot of heartache.
The occasional shallowness of the material is my only real concern about this book. In particular, I found the discussion of the Gimp rather disappointing and that the author rather dropped the ball on SDL. The Simple Direct media Layer has opened the possibility of entire graphics-heavy applications being written in Perl, and would have been an ideal candidate for a chapter. In addition, some discussion as to why an application designer might want to employ the direct methods of OpenGL while within a windowing environment would have been interesting, given the poor coverage it has received in several other recent books.
One other nit was the authors somewhat peculiar dialect of Perl. Possibly this should have been caught at the tech reviewing stage, but very little of the example Perl in the book will run on a Perl earlier than 5.6.0 - but in most cases this is just because the author uses 'our' liberally. This directly contradicts the discussion in the introduction about Perl versions, which is very bad.
The dialect has other peculiarities as well - bare filehandles instead of IO::* modules, extensive use of the CGI module - despite its known systemic problems with memory leaks, insistence on methods being available as class or instance methods wherever possible, but then introducing possibly troubling calling semantics by passing @_ unmodified by delegation, use of @ISA instead of 'use base', using the -w switch instead of scoping warnings, etc.
The book also contains some factual errors - for example Macromedia do *not* require a license fee for software which produces SWF files unless it contains derived code from their reference implementation.
Like some of the other works in the Manning stable, this book suffers at times from being neither fish nor fowl - failing to provide enough reference material for longevity, but sometimes requiring too much background. Hopefully, a second edition would allow more space for the reference section this book deserves.
Despite this, in many ways Verbruggen provides a charming introduction to the topic of graphics and Perl. He covers some interesting modules which may have been unknown to the reader and the book should be an excellent read for the intermediate programmer with an interest in graphics.