It is my belief that the best way to learn any new programming language (or anything new for that matter) is to play...write code, write some more code and then when you've done that, write some more code.

I was originally intimidated by all the {}'s and the regex's and the $'s, but when I was learning, I simply had to think about how I would do something in another language (Delphi or VB are the tools I was using at the time) and then implement it in Perl. After a few weeks of this, I was able to start "thinking" in Perl. I was also lucky to have a really good mentor for Perl, but you have Perlmonks, so I think you're set in that aspect.

But to reinforce what others have said, I learned from The Camel and that's probably what I would suggest as well.

mike