Please browse through our book reviews here, but I think the definitive book has got to be Programming Perl.

For your needs you may well find that much of what you want to do has been covered here at the Monastery, so I'd encourage you to make use of Categorized Questions and Answers and SuperSearch. If you have a question you can't figure out on your own, follow these guidelines and you'll likely find many helpful souls here. Welcome to Perl!

Update: Stuffy is correct that Programming Perl probably isn't for the complete novice, but I do consider it definitive, and it is certainly the second book you should buy, if perhaps not the first.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser