When I first started out, Learning Perl was great.
After getting comfortable with the basics, and I needed more, The Perl Cookbook hit the spot. It was a handy bag of tricks for common tasks with arrays, hashes, sorting, regular expressions, etc.
Later on, I picked up Perl Best Practices. Although it can be a lightening rod of controversy, it made me write more consistent code and to think about why I write the way I do.
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).