For the record:

• I started Learning Perl in the late summer of 1996.
• I turned 50 years old in July of 1996. ('old' and 'gray' are descriptive adjectives; 'bear' is a statement of temperament and fact.) That was ten years ago; I age at one year per calendar year.
• I know the 'schedule issue' all too well. It only get worse as you get older

What I did was take advantage of the local coffee shop. I arranged to get to work forty-five minutes or so before I needed to be in place and functional. I sat down in the back with a double and a scone and began to read. I got through the Llama that way in about two months. I read until either it was time to go to work, or my brain said "I'm full now". Some days I only got through one or two pages, that was OK. I was not really trying to learn the material, I was learning where to find the material again, when I needed it.

Over the next five months, there were a lot of "Oh! That's what that meant!" events as I waded through a Ugly Pile of Code that claimed it was a Spam-monitor. I'd run into something really odd in the code, go back to the appropriate pages in the Llama (and later The Perl -- Many Thanks to Joseph and Randal) and re-read the book for comprehension. Some times I had to re-read three of four times until I figured out the code.

By the end of the year I had a habit started, and I spent the next twelve months working through the basic Perl Cannon (Llama, Camel, Damian's Book, the Panther, the Owl). In the years since I have kept up the habit, working my way through a lot of the basic UNIX literature and such (my current reading is Barth's Nagios book); and the coffee shop has started to build my drink and set the scone out as soon as I walk through the door at 0730. I am nothing if not a creature of habit, after all.

Update -- corrected links; thank you wfsp