Sorry, tried to get this into the chatterbox, but I'm a little new at this (perlmonkeying) too.
I hear that the book: Elements of Programming w/ Perl is very good, there's a review in the last The Perl Journal (a good magazine too), w/ info at www.manning.com. It is a how-to program, w/ perl as the example language. I learned perl from the included docs, like the man said above, it was a lot of huh? until suddenly I got it (or a start on it) seeing how perl was designed to make certain stuff easier. My first formal language (after basic) was pascal, but I think Perl'd make a great start in the business. If you can churn out html, you've got enough to start w/.

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