A few replies to your points, most of which are sound ...
  1. It takes a considerable chunk of time to become a good programmer. It takes a lot less time to become a competent employable programmer. I'd suggest that syntax is not particularly important. Testing, analysis, decomposition and abstraction should come easily to the OP, given that he is a sysadmin.
  2. I got in to perl programming by bugfixing and tweaking stuff from Matt's Script Archive. Fiddling with hideous code is IMO quite a good idea, as it teaches diagnosis skills that you are less likely to exercise when dealing with good code, or even with your own code.
  1. Your book recommendations look to be the sorts of things that might be suitable for a CS course or for a more advanced programmer looking to get some theoretical grounding for his practical knowledge, but not for someone just starting out. I recommend Dave Cross's excellent Data Munging With Perl which despite its name is really not about perl at all, it just uses perl for the examples.

In reply to Re^2: perl programming for a living by DrHyde
in thread perl programming for a living by tcf03

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.