in reply to On the matter of Books

At work we use Programming Perl and the Perl Cookbook. The cookbook has loads of good examples. Especially the sections on arrays and hashes will get you started quickly. Programming Perl is good to get all the details and the ideas behind the language. What also helped a lot are the The Perl FAQ/ Man pages... especially if you have a program that allows you to browse them easily (TkMan for instance).

Have fun, Frans.