I don't know when I first heard about perl - probably in some mag or during a LINUX setup. Reading some of the related newsgroups I got the chance to write a review for danger's "Elements of Programming with Perl". I did this as an absolute beginner to both Perl and Programming and learned very much by reading this book.

The next steps were writing as much scripts as possible. Small tasks to be automated (lots of network stuff on Win NT-Machines).

I think it's important to work on projects that you are really interested in - no matter how small they are and what they do. Have fun and learn the try-and-error-way. If you run into problems you have Perlpod and a friendly and helpful community on usenet ... and last but not least you have PERLMONKS :^)

Of course this won't work for everyone but it does work for me - and I hope to get better slowly but surely.

Enjoy! weini