Here's what I think you should do: 1/ I think that you need to go buy o'reilly's 'programming perl' book and go through it cover to cover.

2/ I think you should go to on-line tutorials and follow the beginner tutorials.

the Programming Perl book can be fairly advanced, so don't lose hope if it talks about concepts that fly right over your head. Concentrate on working through the examples one at a time, and keep at it until it works.

You also need to do the tutorials because the oreilley books are a little too much one person's version of the language and it really helps to get other peoples' view of how to do things. Here are a couple of tutorials I picked off google:
www.comp.leeds.ac.uk
rob's win32 perl tutorial
Picking Up perl

Good luck,

hackmare