Welcome to Perl Monks!

Perl is also my first programming language and after over a year and a half, I'm glad I made that choice. I was very fortunate to join the Monastery the day I decided to begin learning Perl. I spent the first several months going through many of the posts and tutorials. You'll enjoy your time here, get a lot out of it and meet some really great teachers — you've just met three in davido, Grandfather and (most of the time) Anonymous_Monk. :-)

From one beginner to another here are a few suggestions on where to go from the basics:

• Elements of Programming with Perl covers much of what is in Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl but differently. It's definitely geared towards students like you and I who have no prior programming experience and are beginning our education with Perl. It teaches you how to think about your problems while going through the Perl language. Each chapter covers a different topic and ends with a problem that the author breaks down in 'pseudo code' before translating it to Perl. The problems are 'real world', fun to do and expanded upon with questions at the end.
• Perl Cookbook is a great book to grow with especially if you learn best by example. Each chapter covers a different topic in relatively bite sized chunks progressing from beginner to more advanced levels. For now you can just stick to the first example or two in each chapter moving on to more difficult ones as your skills and knowledge grow.
• For fun: Gödel, Escher, Bach is a classic book that discusses a lot of common computer programming theories and shows how they are represented in music, art, math — basically all of life.

As you are no doubt noticing there are A LOT of good Perl books and it can get overwhelming quickly. I would caution (slightly at least) against what I did in my first year of learning Perl and suggest focusing on no more than three books. ;-)

Best of luck and I hope to see more of you in the coming weeks and months.

Luis