Hi stryda42 a big welcome to the monastery,
I reccomend everytime to start reading Perl Cookbook: dunno where you are in the learning curve but surely you'll find some fields where you know nothing or only few things. Reading working recipies is the fastest way i know to learn. This is a quite old but worth to read book.

Then as suggested, Modern Perl. Concisely and precisely Modern Perl enligth also darker cornor of the language. If you can read the whole book without problem so you are at a good point.

Then choose next book thinking in what you need or want you want to do: Mastering Regular expression, Mastering Algorithms with Perl, Learning Perl on Win32 Systems, PerlTk, programming the DBI...

Only at this point i suggest the reading of High Order Perl: it's tough but an excellent read.

Maybe i'm a bit slow (i have no scientific or programming background.. sure you better) but consider the first 10 years to learn the basis.. like in kung-fu.

hth
L*

PS consider to use Super Search..
L*

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