G'day chrestomanci,

I went to the O'Reilly Perl page to find you a link to Learning Perl and immediately found two others of interest. If you hunt around, there may be others.

• Learning Perl, 6th Edition
• Learning Perl Student Workbook, 2nd Edition
• Beginning Perl

Follow the links for more information, reviews, prices, formats, etc. The first two have exercises and separate answers to the exercises.

You might also consider using the online documentation; although, while that has many examples, it doesn't have exercises.

• perlintro -- a brief introduction and overview of Perl: This introduces concepts in an order appropriate for someone learning to program; starting with sequence/selection/iteration and then moving into I/O, subroutines and more advanced topics.
• perl - The Perl 5 language interpreter: This is the main perl manpage. It has a Tutorials section; there's tutorials in other sections but they're mostly of a more advanced nature (at least for someone with little or no programming experience). The Reference section would probably provide a useful adjunct to whatever books you choose.

I haven't used Strawberry Perl for a couple of years but I'd be surprised if it wasn't "sufficient"; it certainly would've been when I last used it (maybe v5.10.x).