I am probably a rare example, but I started learning Perl for fun. No job, no other obligations. I had some linux box at home and I wanted to learn some serious programming not involving C/C++ languages as the inctricacies of memory management were not really interesting to me. I wanted results, not pointers and, as I thought then, pointless variable initializations.

In the begining I learned the most from 'Learning Perl' book I borrowed from a local library. Later on I read 'Programming Perl' which was a real fun. (And yes, 'Learning Perl' was fun too.) After that, getting friendly with 'perldoc' got me a good ride, and I'm on it all the time.

I own a few Perl books, but rarely read them now, unless on some boring sunny afternoons.

I never used any of those beginner-tutorials for Perl.