Howdy Aspec, here's some links that might be useful for getting started with Perl:

Introductions, first steps and general information:

• The perlintro manpage
• learn.perl.org
• perldoc.perl.org
• Five Common Misconceptions While Learning Perl
• Resources to get help in Perl

Tutorials:

• Perldoc tutorial index
• Tutorials on PerlMonks
• Perl Tutorial Hub

FAQs:

• The perlfaq manpage

  • perlfaq1 - General Questions about Perl
  • perlfaq2 - Obtaining and Learning about Perl
  • perlfaq3 - Programming Tools
  • perlfaq4 - Data Manipulation
  • perlfaq5 - Files and Formats
  • perlfaq6 - Regular Expressions
  • perlfaq7 - General Perl Language Issues
  • perlfaq8 - System Interaction
  • perlfaq9 - Web, Email and Networking

• Just the FAQs (from The Perl Journal, by Dominus)

Books:

• Learning Perl, aka "The Llama" (June 2011)
• Beginning Perl (by Ovid; 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, aka "The Big-Horn Sheep" (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, aka "The Timber Wolf" (August 1999)
• Higher-Order Perl (March 2005; PDF here)
• Perl Testing (July 2006)
• Perl Medic (March 2004)

If you have more questions, by all means feel free to ask them here on Perlmonks, too. The Monastery welcomes everyone who seeks enlightenment.

Hello Aspec, and welcome to the Monastery!

if anyone has a good reference for understanding perl (a beginners guide) I would love to hear some recommendations about getting a grasp on the language.

The Monastery has a lot of information on this topic (Super Search is your friend!). For example, you will find many useful references in the March, 2014, thread Want to learn PERL.

For books, see davido’s homepage, especially Learning Perl (the “Llama Book”), and Modern Perl by chromatic. The latter is available for free download from http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/.

Hope that helps,