IMHO I think
merlyn is wrong in this case (gads, I never thought I would say that). Granted, I'm no perl guru/expert (yet). I've been tinkering with perl for the past few weeks (ok, i've tinkered before, but always had to put it down for some other rush project on the job/at home) and have never really been formally schooled in any programming language (I took a pascal class once, but I knew more about computers in general than the teacher.. we didn't learn much pascal =]) Armed with the Perl CD Bookshelf, I read through Learning Perl, and am about halfway through "reading" Programming Perl. I think it's pretty easy to pick up, and it "just makes sense"(tm). I fiddled with PHP before picking perl back up, and the languages are disturbingly similar.
Perl isn't a difficult language to learn, and by all means newbies that have some gumption into doing a little bit of research/work to learn something shouldn't get out of the way.
-marius