I want to follow-up on the point to read from a variety of different sources. This has been working for me, at least. In the last 4 months I have purchased:
Learn Perl in 21 Days
Teach Yourself CGI
Programming the Perl DBI
Network Programming Perl
Object-Oriented Perl
The Perl CD Bookshelf (only $60!) which includes:
Learning Perl
Programming Perl
Perl Cookbook
Perl in a Nutshell
Learning Perl on Win32 Systems
Advanced Perl Programming

And of course there is all the great documentation and tutorial here on PM and elsewhere online. I'm not recommending these particular books to you, I'm just saying having a wide and diverse library has done me well. Have I read all of them through? No. Do I understand all that I read? No. But relying on the work of more than one or two has helped me tremendously in piecing it all together. Many of the books cross paths and seeing the same concept described a little differently produces those magic "Oh I see!" moments quite well.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot";
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;

In reply to Re: Re: Is it just me...? by nysus
in thread How do I become a good programmer? by kevin_i_orourke

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.