in reply to A reasonable approach to getting a Perl skill foundation?
I recommend the Perl Cookbook over PBP. It has working code examples, classified by "how do I do", which is a great way to get up to speed fast. I have been doing a lot of Python support lately, and this is always the kind of thing I'm looking up (though online; a copy of the Python Cookbook would probably be saving me time as well): "how do regex matches work again?" or "what's the best way to read a file backwards?" and so on.
Stack Overflow is also an invaluable resource for this kind of thing.
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom