I also recently began learning Perl on my own, and have found that having a good book as Companion is really a good thing. That way you can work inside of a track, and you can get inspired from that and do your own things or expand on the examples in the book. You cannot learn Perl by reading about it, you have to code .. but if you are on your own a good book is highly valuable in my experience.
"Learning Perl" and "Intermediate Perl", as well as "Perl Cookbook" are fine books.