in reply to Are these Perl books adequate?

I am mostly interested in using Perl to automate & maintain a small web site or two.

Given your interest in Perl and the web, I would strongly recommend two of the O'Reilly books:

I started web-programming with these two books and they gave me most of what I needed to get a good start on the subject. If you add the Camel book for reference and follow all the links recommended on this node you'll be up and running.