First off...be sure to spell it right: "Perl", not "Pearl". Ok, that's out of the way... :-) I am relatively new to Perl myself. I started with "Learning Perl", then "Programming Perl", then "Perl Cookbook" (still working on this one), and also "Mastering Regular Expressions". I've got "Advanced Perl Programming" on deck. All of these are O'Reilly books; they've all been very very good. If you get through all of those and understand everything, I think you'll be doing pretty well. Good luck!