Did you read books? If so, which ones? Did you purchase traning videos? Play with code? ...

My first Perl experience was seeing it. I hated it, thought it would be even harder than C, and swore that I would stick to BASIC. I then saw a little book ("Programmeren in Perl" by Hildo Biersma), and read it. The misleading examples got me reading the official documentation, starting with perlsyn and perldata. I then skimmed over perlfunc and perlsub, and coded some lame CGI scripts for a few months.

Then, I started reading more documentation. Still, only the official docs that are distributed with perl itself.

It wasn't until recently that I began reading books, but most of the time, they just confirmed what I already thought.

Reading perldocs is, imnsho, a very good way to learn Perl and its guts, but it does take some time.

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