One book that I have found indespensiblle for Perl is the Perl Black Book. It's got about 25 chapters ( give or take ) and practically each page covers one small bit of Perl. It's written in the style of "the novice programmer says 'How can I do this?'" so it's been a great reference for me.

The O'Reilly books are also high on my list, but I've been programming for 20 some odd years now. They're probably not the best to start with if you don't have any coding background. That said, the teacher I took Perl from was thinking about changing from the O'Reilly to (what I assume) was the WROX (publisher) series. Currently I'm using theirs for JavaScript and it is definitely geared towards the beginner, so that may be the one for you.

Good luck and welcome to the Monestary.

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.