Free Stuff: chromatic's introductory and freely downloadable Modern Perl.

Not-Free Stuff: After digesting Modern Perl, the Camel book, and the various on-line introductions and tutorials here and at perldoc.perl.org, Perl Best Practices (PBP) is a bracing read. I certainly don't endorse all the "practices", but I think the discussions of each practice and its rationale are well worth one's time and attention.

And BTW: The language is named Perl, and the interpreter executable is named perl.

Hello citaro07, and welcome to the Monastery!

• perldoc is your friend! Start with perlintro, and then look at the FAQs and tutorials.

• The Monastery also has a Tutorials section. Work your way through the tutorials listed under “Getting Started with Perl.”

Hope that helps,

There is also a good tutorial at PerlMaven (work in progress).

Stefan

perl ships with lots of documentation accessed through perldoc.

try :

perldoc perlintro

It's also online -> perlintro

There is no "language called PERL", it's called Perl with only the first letter capitalized. :) And the program you use to run your code is called perl with a small "p" at the beginning!

In addition to the great resources others have suggested, I'd also recommend the free PDF book called Learning Perl the hard way. Despite the title, I found it the easiest and quickest intro that helped me actually start using the language right away. Once you start using the language and get the sense of it, the other guides will start making much more sense. In my humble opinion the best way to start will be to jump into the language with this book, try things out, and take the help of perldoc and Google when you need them. That would be the most hands-on way of learning that would help you quickly get the feel of the language, and also keeps it fun! :)

Learning Perl the Hard Way is well written, at least from my brief browse of its early pages. Although dated in minor ways, the way it introduces the reader to programming is clear and comprehensible.

G'day citaro07,

Welcome to the monastery.

O'Reilly (mentioned by bensonmonk above), publishes a wide range of Perl-related books and other resources (such as videos). Their main page for these products is: Perl - O'Reilly Media.

While I haven't read it myself, Learning Perl, also known as the Llama Book, generally comes highly recommended for beginners.

This sort of question gets asked so often here that I keep a list of links.

There are links and references to many good resources at Getting Started with Perl.