in reply to looking towards learning OOP

I am with brother moritz, i.e. the two step approach. Once you have mastered the OO concepts it can serve you well in any programming environment. OO is a philosophy and program languages have various degrees of supporting it, ranging from not-at-all to fully OO.

You can for example even write OO programs in COBOL (with a lot of discipline I admit) but other language have specific constructs which make it a lot easier. I liked Object-Oriented Design as a general book on OO. As a warning: OO can have a steep learning curve. The more experience you have with non-OO languages the longer it usually takes to write decent OO programs.

Specific for Perl you can look in the Perl Cookbook, chapter 13. “Classes, Objects, and Ties”, Programming Perl, Chapter 5 “Packages, Modules, and Object Classes” and Advanced Perl Programming, chapter 7. “Object-Oriented Programming” + chapter 8. “Object Orientation: The Next Few Steps”. There is lots of stuff in the Monastery and on Internet in general, just Google for it. The suggestions above are also well worth considering.

HTH