j2ulian: like the above post, you can approach your learning in an almost infinite amount of ways. Here was my thinking, and a start on how I did it: I wanted a project that would tie together many technolgies that I'm interested in, and something relatively easy to get going. This one was fun because you get lots of gratification from it, and you can add tons features on to it as you learn. Here's what I did...

-- Been running Linux for a while now. Everyone these days ships with Apache server. Read the documentation for apache and some of the how-tos to get the basics down. It's very very easy to serve up basic pages from you computer this way. It's very likely all you have to do is put your scripts in the cgi-bin, chmod them, and you're ready to call to localhost (your computer).

-- Get MySQL. Note: don't use the RH7 RPM of MySQL. Horrible. They may have the bug fixed now, though. The program has an EXCELLENT basic tutorial in the online docs.

-- Learned enough Perl (my true objective here!) to grab some modules from CPAN: you'll need to download DBI.pm and a driver for whatever database you use (acronym: DBD). Load up the module (by the way, any relatively new version of perl ships with the awesome CGI module).

-- I actually am a book junkie (got a couple of Merlyn's :)). I bought the Cheetah book (Programming the Perl DBI, published by O'reilly) to learn the DBI module, but the basics are pretty straight forward if you know how to call objects and methods. Look for a Perl Object tutorial on the web for the basics. May even be one here. Don't know, I'm too new :)

the next steps run like this: * Learn enough MySQL (or other dB) to setup a basic databse for all of your contacts.
* Learn the CGI module well enough (lots of tutorials out there on this extremely popular module) to do some very basic page generation with forms.
* Learn the DBI module well enough to do a fetch from your database.
* MAKE SURE you "use strict" for your scripts.
* THEN GO FOR IT! You'll learn many many things by making errors (tip: I like to "use diagnostics" for debugging. Good for beginners like us!).

After you try some of this and begin to understand it, you'll see why Perl is often referred to as a 'glue' language, and a great one at that! I've had a blast with this one...Good luck.
--Matt