I found the book "Perl: The Programmer's Companion" immensely helpful when I started out. It walks you through different areas of functionality that Perl has (regexes, file IO, control statements, etc), and has a style I found very easy to follow.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/047197563X/002-7516171-1500024?v=glance