From the preface of Learning Perl:
"Although you don't need to know a single bit about Perl to begin reading this book, we recommend that you already have familiarity with such programming concepts such as variables, loops, subroutines and arrays..."

Elements of Programming with Perl goes covers all of these fundamental concepts as well as teaching beginners how to break down problems into pseudo code and translating it to Perl. There are 'real life' projects in the book like figuring out payroll as opposed to playing fetch with Dino for a few hundred pages.

I know it's a popular book, written by a popular Perl personality but I wish people would stop recommending Learning Perl to beginners with little to no programming background.