I would recommend that you take the earlier books (especially the 1996 book) with a pinch of salt -- Perl 5.8 is a different animal than the version that was available back before 1996. I started using Perl in 1998 and that was when Perl 5.4 was still relatively new.

In addition, browsers now behave differently than they did in 1996 -- if you find a lot of references to Internet Explorer 2 or 3, that book may not be much use.

Finally, some rules of thumb have changed -- in 1996 broadband was fairly rare and dial-up was the rule. Processing speeds, disk size and available memory were also smaller. These days we don't think twice about downloading megabytes of data.

Get the latest edition of the Camel (Programming Perl, from O'Reilly) and have that to hand as a reference book. When in doubt, that's the gold standard.

And to quote Larry Wall, "Have the appropriate amount of fun."