... Learning Perl is a good one for learning Perl, but, no offence to Merlyn, its not one of the best for learning to program
That's completely correct. I didn't write
Learning Perl to learn to program, although people have used it for that. I wrote it for programmers to learn to program in Perl. If you don't know what an array or a subroutine is, you probably will get lost from time to time in the Llama.
I learned to program when I was 8. That's too long ago for me to remember what I was doing to learn, so I really can't write about it or teach it. All I can do is write about what I have recently learned, like Perl.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.