I actually prefer computer-based material to books for computer related stuff.

That's OK as long as you can get high enough quality materials, which it sounds like you are having trouble with.

I'm still looking for a compiled language that gives me the productivity of Perl, but compiled performance.

Ever taken a look at Common Lisp? Some people are alergic to parentheses, but if you can get past that and the lack of a nice community (something both Perl and Haskell excel at), it's a pretty nice general purpose language. SBCL is about the fastest of the Free implementations (don't look too hard at the shootout for style tips though, all the programs there have been badly contorted in the effort to get every last drop of speed).