RE: On the matter of Books

[le]

You should take a look at these books. They're all published by O'Reilly, and that's good. (No, I'm not endorsing them, but I think their books are good.)

• Learning Perl, aka "The Llama book", definitely the first book for beginners. One of the authors is merlyn.
• Programming Perl, aka "The Camel Book" or "The Bible". You need this.
• Perl Cookbook, aka "The Ram book". Lots of small code snippets useful everywhere.
• Perl In A Nutshell, aka "The Camel Head book". Get this if you need a handy, but complete reference.

There are many others, but these are best for beginners. (And you need enough time to read through them :) ).

[TGI]

I started learning Perl in February, and after some web browsing chose to buy almost those exact books.I actually used the Win32 version of Learning Perl (Gecko) instead of the Llama. And I got the Perl CD Bookshelf instead of just Nutshell

Learning Perl (for Win32) is amazing, by far one of the best tutorial books I've read. Definitely a must read.

The others have been useful, and I recommend them. I also suggest that you consider getting the CD-ROM version of Nutshell.

In order of usefulness:

1. Learning Perl: I used this a bunch at first and occasionally for reference.
2. Perl In A Nutshell (and CD-ROM): I use this almost every day that I write code.
3. Perl Cookbook: A great sourcebook, can be a huge timesaver
4. Programming Perl: I use this one to puzzle out arcana that aren't discoverable by other means.
Good luck finding the time!