The English Present Perfect (henceforth PP) has been regarded as one the most complex morphosyntactic forms for learners to acquire by many linguists and therefore, it is the latest grammatical tense form to emerge in learner Englishes. The major source of the information they get on the target language, i.e. English, is offered by textbooks and grammar books. The information in the textbooks and grammars may or may not be sufficient to teach learners to categorize PP correctly or to make a distinction between this tense form and other tense forms such as Simple Past. Moreover, there is a dissension between linguists as well about the category of PP (namely whether to call it a tense or an aspect) and this disagreement is reflected in the descriptions of textbooks and grammars as well. Taking these factors into consideration, the representation of PP and SP is analysed in this contrastive study in textbooks and grammars written by Hungarian authors as well as in textbooks and grammars written by English authors to report on the differences in the way they introduce PP.