A friend of mine, during an employment hiatus of his own doing, worked through a copy of Perl in 21 Days. He had a good programming background in other languages to start, but said that was a good book for him. Your mileage may vary.

That said, as others have said, there are wonderful tutorials here and wonderful people here who have assisted many, including me, in times of "bang head here over problem".

One book I can heartily recommend is Coriolis's Perl Black Book. Great reference for when you can't remember that niggling little syntax detail.

As far as comparing child rearing and Perl, I can tell you that Perl is easier than getting a cat to do what you say. :)

Good luck!

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: The Gates of Perl are not newbie friendly. by Popcorn Dave
in thread The Gates of Perl are not newbie friendly. by Hielo

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.