1. "Learning Perl", do all the exercises
2. "Intermediate Perl", do all the exercises
3. Lincoln Stein's "Network Programming with Perl" (which is one of the best written books in any programming language)

Do all the exercises, that is how you practice

If the program does something useful for you, its a bonus

Forget about making a useful contribution, it requires more though and experience than you have :) you'd have to conduct a survey to find something both/easy/and/needed

Here are links of links of links ... on learning to program
General Computer Science: For Beginners
Where Do I Go Next?
Re: Reading other people's modules and codes
Re^8: How to use wxHtmlEasyPrinting (On debugging, verify everything, talk to teddybear ... and links and links
Re^3: highest value in hash (virtual teddybear)

Try a Super Search for "cisco" and get yourself a copy of "Learning Perl" and the "Perl Cookbook".

James

As everyone has said working through the books and example exercises is the best place to start. As you work through the examples try to relate them to something you are familiar with. If you can try to relate them to how you could use them in your own area of interest, you will find them much more enjoyable and easier to grasp.

When you have the basics try creating your own simple networking scripts. You could try creating a simple ping script, open a connection and communicate with a remote server, try SNMP to one of your switches. This may seem daunting at first, but use cpan modules and look at the examples in their documentation, you will see its not that scary. Don't worry at this stage about creating something new, re-inventing the wheel is a great way to learn as you can compare your solution to others. As you create these simple scripts you should gain a better understanding of how perl handles networking tasks. This should help you start to form ideas of how to solve problems you encounter and automate simple tasks.

Hi Shivam,

I wholehearted second the suggestion of buying "Learning Perl" (6th Edition is the latest one). I would also suggest that you buy "Beginning Perl" By Ovid. I too started off without any prior programming knowledge and by the time I was halfway through these two books, I already did small automation. Most important is "Do The Exercises At The End Of Chapter". It very very important.There is a reason why I included these two books in my signature...Because these books are simply awesome. :)

If you are on Windows, please try DWIM Perl. I suggest this primarily for two reasons. There is a chance that some application would already have some version of Activestate Perl already installed on your Windows System. I found this to be true in my case. So I downloaded and installed DWIM Perl, which installs in a complete separate directory.

It also comes pre loaded with a lot of useful Modules. To quote some, the Net::SSH2 Module (which is one of the many awesome Perl Modules used to login to other systems to run commands and capture output), The MIME::Lite Module which is perfect for automating the E-mail Alerts, The Config::Tiny Module which allows you to have a separate "config" file where you can store the username/Password, commands, and such stuff which your script will be using.

What you will also need is a good Perl Editor. If you use DWIM Perl, you'll get PADRE Editor. Or you can also try the Komodo Edit (Free Version).

Hope this helps you to get started

use Learning::Perl;
use Beginning::Perl::Ovid;
print "Awesome Books";
[download]