surfbass wrote: the o reilley book, but it puts me to sleep

Do you mean the llama book, Learning Perl? I encourage you to tank up on your favorite caffiene source and spend two days to work through the book. Do every single exercise. The physical act of writing the necessary code to do the exercises will implant some PerlThink(tm) in your brain. It may be a drag while you're doing it. Once you're done you'll have a foundation that will make your time spent here much more productive and valuable.