You've made a great first step, buying Learning Perl. And the recommendations for the Perl Cookbook, 2nd ed. are also excellent - it is a great source of quality code which solves problems. BTW, the 2nd edition just came out this month, most stores probably still carry the original.

This question has been asked before, and I answered it once. I included a small list of tutorials and guidelines, and some instructions on how to search for more. Give it a peak.

When you're done with the Llama, you'll probably be wanting to get into bigger programming, modules, OO, etc. Check out merlyn's Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules - the Alpaca. I just brought it home, and I expect to spend many profitable hours with it and my powerbook.

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Perl programming and scheduling in the corporate world, as explained by dragonchild:

"Uhh ... that'll take me three weeks, broken down as follows: 1 day for coding, the rest for meetings to explain why I only need 1 day for coding."