Perl Best Practices is a great book for novices as well, even though the title implies one already knows a lot about Perl. Using just one example: how to open a file. Looking at reference docs gives you 20 different ways to open a file. Perl Best Practices tells you the two best ways to do it and why (for most cases confronting beginner to medium level users).

Also, when you are writing small programs to teach yourself things, nothing beats reading how others do it in the PerlMonks Q&A section.

EDIT: Added some conditional text to my assertion.

In reply to Re: Perl Programs by jffry
in thread Perl Programs by sreenath

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