Of the 20+ Perl and Perl-related books I own, PBP is my number two in terms of how useful it has been to me. (Number one is the Camel, of course.)

I'd been poking around with Perl for a year or two, not really knowing what I was doing when I stumbled across it in a bookstore one day.

I think the best thing I can say about it is that it gave me some direction - a roadmap of sorts for writing half-decent code that I could look at six months later and still make some sense of.

So for somebody like you (or me) - somebody who isn't really a professional programmer and hasn't already learned many of these things - I couldn't recommend it highly enough.

Cheers,
Darren :)