The short answer is: find a book. I could recommend a Perl book or two, but I feel that Perl isn't a good language to start with. You might be better off learning Java or C++ to begin with. Both are good langauges to get into the concepts of programming. Eventually I learned Perl because it's extremely powerful, useful, and when it comes to cgi programming, that's all my web server supports. Maybe a better question would be, what do I want to do? And which programming language would let me start solving real problems?