Honorable Monks,

I'm a final year Uni student with the basic programming experience that you'd expect from a Science student. Much theory, little experience. However, knowing that i'd soon have that safety net(no pun intended) ripped away from my head, i set out to get a little outside programming. i have a devastating weakness for books. If i have to learn something practical, i read about it first(No two ways about that) before engaging in it, and it was a book that led me to Perl. An awesome demonstration of Regular Expressions that left me awed for hours. And so i struck out

To be quite honest, it's been hell so far. A few months of hell. Not the sytanx itself, because i found concepts related to languages, im a bit more comfortable with.(i.e Bash, Python, Php). I did a quick search of good Perl books, and then picked Learning Perl 6th, Programming Perl 4th and Intermediate Perl 2nd at once.(like i said, weakness for books). While doing that, i came across several destructive reviews of the Perl programming language itself. It's been described as a "Filthy language" "Dangerous for beginners" and basically, the downfall of many a programmer. You would come across jokes that haven't been used on even COBOL for ages. It's agreed there's a little language rivalry from time to time, but with Perl, it's crossed the boundaries of extreme. Right now, i just want to know, if there's anything i'm missing?

Secondly, I've done a little research as well, and found out, most of the things in the books, i've picked up are not recommended for newbies as well. And to be honest, everything in learning Perl 6th Ed works for me, but my question to the Glorious Monks, though the book is based on Perl 5.14, apparently it doesn't meet the "Morden Perl" criteria. I honestly don't mind unlearning everything and starting from scratch again, i just want to be on the right Path. So what are your recommendations?