I learned Perl thanks to a lot of patience and help from a a co-worker and using existing scripts at the company I worked for as a starting point. One time my co-worker asked "Well??" And I answerd "Well what?" He responded "Well, it's been five minutes and you haven't asked a question yet!!" ;-)

Books I have found helpful (links to Amazon):

• Programming Perl (3rd Ed) (a.k.a. the Camel book)
• Perl Best Practices
• Effective Perl Programing (a.k.a. the Shiny Ball book)
• Network Programming with Perl

Books I have heard enough good things about to recommend even though I have no personal experience with them:

• Learning Perl
• Higher Order Perl