I had an idea for a book: "Learning to Speak Perl". Here's the synopsis:

Perl can be seen as a natural language, with nouns, verbs, pronouns, idioms, objects, and (perhaps most important of all) context. Why not, then, learn Perl as if it were a spoken language? Become familiar with nouns, what they are, how they are used, and plurality. Then learn which nouns are special pronouns, and so on.

This book is meant as a beginner's tutorial for someone who might be somewhat overwhelmed by what seems like line noise. Topics covered are: data types, references, complex data structures, functions and subroutines, modules, classes (object-oriented programming), and regular expressions.

I started work on it at my web site.

japhy -- Perl and Regex Hacker