There is no blasphemy. There is nothing worse than unquestionned dogms. Neverthless, I would be cautious about "solutions oriented books". I don't have read the "black book" so I can't say if it really belongs to that category. "Solutions books" can eventually turn people into cargo cult programming. Instead of trying to understand how things work, these people cut and paste code that has been known to work before. Even the resulting code "work", it may be a security threat or not be maintanable.

If you want to progress, you must think long term and eventually read books that teach you concepts as well as examples of good code in a particular language. Programming Perl tutorial part is certainly too fast paced for a total beginner. I have heard that the new edition of Learning Perl has dropped reference to UNIX to be more geared towards beginners.

added after reading mirod: There is a lot of talk about the fact there is more than one way to do it: according to Larry Wall it is ok to talk baby-perl... It is indeed nice to have a language that support baby-talk. But one have to eventually be able to read adult code. So books that shove perlisms under the carpet may be too limitative.

Good readings...

-- stefp