First and foremost you need to decide what you _need_ to do. You can buy hundreds of books, go to thousands of courses and never learn a thing.

In Learning Perl 3 RS says something along the lines of "Perl isn't a good language to learn with if you aren't going to use it everyday." (I don't have my copy handy.)

This is the truth. You need to be active with your language of choice. I used "The Elements of Programming With Perl - Andrew Johnson" to learn the rudiments of programming.

But I chose Perl because as a Sys Admin it made the most sense to use Perl. Now as I further my programming skills I have begun to learn Java with "Thinking In Java (2nd Ed) -- Bruce Eckel" which isn't going nearly as well simply because I don't have a real _need_ for Java at the moment. (And because I think in Perl... much to the chagrin of my programmer friends!)

But you've come here so I assume you want to learn Perl. Now just figure out why and it will all fall into place. Think of programming as another language (which it is.) Would you ever learn French because you thought it would be a good job? Until you _need_ to learn French you probably won't. So if you are lost in France you _need_ to learn French. Along the same lines if you _need_ to read a 120,000 page log file looking for rm -f, you'll learn Perl.
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lmoran@wtsg.com
There's more than one way to do it, just don't use my way.