A few replies to your points, most of which are sound ...
- It takes a considerable chunk of time to become a good programmer. It takes a lot less time to become a competent employable programmer. I'd suggest that syntax is not particularly important. Testing, analysis, decomposition and abstraction should come easily to the OP, given that he is a sysadmin.
- I got in to perl programming by bugfixing and tweaking stuff from Matt's Script Archive. Fiddling with hideous code is IMO quite a good idea, as it teaches diagnosis skills that you are less likely to exercise when dealing with good code, or even with your own code.
- Your book recommendations look to be the sorts of things that might be suitable for a CS course or for a more advanced programmer looking to get some theoretical grounding for his practical knowledge, but not for someone just starting out. I recommend Dave Cross's excellent Data Munging With Perl which despite its name is really not about perl at all, it just uses perl for the examples.
