As others have mentioned, Learning Perl is a great book for... er... learning Perl! What hasn't been pointed out is that it assumes that you have at least some knowledge of how programming languages work. I don't know whether you have any knowledge of other programming languages, but if Perl is your first language then you'd be much better off going for Elements of Programming with Perl by Andrew Johnson.

Perl Training in the UK <http://www.iterative-software.com>