Get yourself a copy of Perl in 21 days.

• Choosing a Perl Book, by Simon Cozens (perl.com)
• Perl Books, by Uri Guttman (perl.com)
• Camel Critiques, by Tom Christiansen (perl.com)

I personally would recommend the following excellent on-line Perl books:

• Picking Up Perl by Bradley Kuhn
• Beginning Perl by Simon Cozens

You can't learn Perl in 24 hours, 21 days, 12 weeks, 9 months, or a year. I've been programming Perl for nearly five years and I'm still learning.

jdporter
The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.

The book that seems most appropriate in this particular case, is Perl Debugged. It's aimed at beginners, discusses ways to avoid and eliminate bugs, and gets quite favourable reviews. (Amazon, Perl Books)

There's also a title Debugging Perl.

I don't think you can ever learn Perl, but you can get more proficient the more you do. That said, the reason I did suggest the 21 day book is I know a couple of people it did well for. Personally I learned via the camel, but it was the textbook for the class that I took.

And yes there are a bunch of lousy Perl books out there, the Dummies Guide being one of the worst IMHO. However, I still think that for the person with little or no programming experience, O'Reilly tends to be a bit heavy.

Just my opinion.

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

But unfortunately, people who don't already know Perl aren't qualified to critique a Perl book. I.e. you may think you learned well, even though you may have learned crap. "Perl in 21 Days" might teach well, but if the Perl it teaches is crappy, then it's a crappy Perl book. And that is exactly what I understand to be the case.

jdporter
The 6th Rule of Perl Club is -- There is no Rule #6.

Next, get yourself a copy of Perl - obviously. :) ActiveState's is good for windows.

The OP stated that the app is already up and running on a Unix box. AS might be useful to take home on a laptop for practice, though.

All code given here is UNTESTED unless otherwise stated.

You're right. After re-reading the post I realized I missed that point.

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

OK.

Glad I never do that - yeah, right!

To the original poster, Lori: Beware, the perl on your Unix box may be MUCH older than what you download from ActiveState today. Once you get commandline access, issue:

perl -v
[download]

to get the version number. It may actually make more sense to install an older version on your laptop (or other machine) if you don't have convenieint access to the main machine or an identical test machine.

Though given your situation, you probably should arrange convenient access to a sutiable test environment, complete w/ SQL db and webserver - you're going to need it.

--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com

All code given here is UNTESTED unless otherwise stated.