Regarding books:

• When I first started out, Learning Perl was great.
• After getting comfortable with the basics, and I needed more, The Perl Cookbook hit the spot. It was a handy bag of tricks for common tasks with arrays, hashes, sorting, regular expressions, etc.
• Later on, I picked up Perl Best Practices. Although it can be a lightening rod of controversy, it made me write more consistent code and to think about why I write the way I do.