While I agree with you for the most part (in that perl has *very* good on-line documentation/man pages) I personally don't *learn* very well from man pages and prefer a gentler/more readable introduction to new languages & concepts.

That's why I recommended the "programming perl" book.

To the OP: if money is tight, or you're comfortable with reading documentation in fairly short - and not too related - chapers, go for the online man-pages. Otherwise, I would still prefer to recommend the "programming perl" (and "learning perl") books from O'Reilly as the the first steps.