Other books which might be useful to a course of study in Perl, study the OReilly's RegEx book, or read McConnell (is it?) Code Complete (recommended to me two years ago on this site). Code Complete did more for the development of my programming skills than any other single book I've read.

Some of my best work has started out on napkins or the backs of envelopes. I've worked out API issues and outlined the Synopsis of the perldoc for my next project while riding a bus or sitting on a beach. One of the more useful scripts I wrote at at an earlier job five or six years ago started as a discussion with a friend who teaches CS at UGa. I outlined a file format on a napkin and picked his brain about parsing it with Perl and marking it up with LaTeX.

When I made the choice to learn programming as a craft, instead of merely dabbling enough in it to simply get my work done, I borrowed a friend's O'Reilly's Library and consumed it one lunch break at a time over several months. It was a pleasant distraction from my other responsibilities on that job.

The recommendation above to review some working code is an excellent one. Pick some popular or esoteric module from the repository, print it out (check out a2ps for this) and study it. Code reviews are an important tool (recommended by Code Complete, among, I'm sure others). And is frequently a final review for me before committing my latest work to CPAN or even to my svn repository.

-- Hugh