Agree with Jeffa, that most languages are what you make of them. The Modern Perl books is a good place to start learning. I've been using the Mojolicious web framework and I'm happy with it.

The key to learning Perl is to

   use warnings;
   use strict;
[download]

Thanks. I'm currently at YAPC. but I'm having issues with cpan, (cpanm works) at the moment, but thats a issue for another topic. Web apps are nice, however my job wouldnt have much use unfortunatly. I have also extensively used PHP CLI so web vs cli doesnt mean much to me. Next month Brian D Foy is coming to my company to teach perl, and I am signed up for that

I like Brian's book Mastering Perl. You are lucky be in his class. Savor it.

Neil Watson
watson-wilson.ca

Well, you already found the Monastery (i.e. Perlmonks), arguably the best site for learning Perl. ;) The perldoc site is very useful as a reference, as is perl.org itself. CPAN is a treasure trove (and meta::cpan is a great way of accessing it). That's about what I can think of right now; no doubt other, more experienced monks will know more.

Just because I love killing trees (or electrons, as the case may be), here's some suggestions for books as well, both old and new:

• Learning Perl, aka "The Llama" (June 2011)
• Beginning Perl (August 2012)
• Intermediate Perl, aka "The Alpaca" (July 2012)
• Mastering Perl (January 2014)
• Programming Perl, aka "The Camel"; a must-have (February 2012)
• Modern Perl (April 2014; PDF here)
• Advanced Perl Programming (June 2005)
• Perl Best Practices (July 2005)
• Effective Perl Programming, aka "The Shiny Ball" (April 2010)
• Perl Cookbook (August 2003)
• Perl Hacks (May 2006)
• Perls of Wisdom (December 2004)
• Introducing Regular Expressions (July 2012)
• Mastering Regular Expressions (August 2006)
• Mastering Algorithms with Perl (August 1999)
• Higher-Order Perl (March 2005; PDF here)
• Perl Testing (July 2006)

There's also many books dedicated to specific topics such as Perl/Tk, DBI, Perl and XML, CGI programming with Perl, and much much more.

I don't think PHP is a hideous language at all. I have seen plenty of Perl code that is far more hideous, although the quality standards bar tends to be a bit lower from PHP coders in general.

Since you are a PHP programmer, i am going to presume that you are keen in web programming. You should check out Perl Dancer which is a micro framework for creating web apps. This might allow you to learn Perl in an environment you are more accustomed to.

You'll also need to learn how to install all of this stuff. I recommend starting with Perl Brew and use cpanm to install your CPAN modules.

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

Some of the very best resources can be found in CS departments at colleges and universities... and in many cases, those are available, on-line, to the general public and free-of-charge. Your favorite search engine can help you if you provide reasonable search strings -- perhaps, for example Perl tutorial university or the like.

And don't miss the tutorials here... nor the fact that when you have installed Perl you have, in most cases, installed a very comprehensive set of docs, many of which provide example code.

Thanks ww! I have searched, but ideally, I don't like tutorials in the traditional sense. What works best for me is finding a project to do, and just doing it. Then, I can work my way through what I will need for it. I was thinking of doing a webchat script, but I feel I should get a handle on CLI before I play with CGI. And yes! perldoc is great! If the module (even from cpan)provides it, its a great resource. :) On the advise of boftx I made a perl script which finds world-writeable files under the homedir, and removes that bit. That was fairly easy, once I understood the code.

Yes a valuable book, but not for the beginner!
Bill

Hrm, is this book something useful for someone who already know PCRE? I have used PCRE extensively with PHP.