The public library is free, and therein you will may find the Llama book, Learning Perl. That's the best book I know of for someone starting out with Perl.

For editors, I happen to like SciTE. Look for it here: http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html. It's an open source project, and works great for a plethora of languages. It does syntax highlighting, of course, too.