Software Engineering with Ada by Grady Booch and Doug Bryan
provides an excellent foundation for understanding object
oriented programming..."heavy Perl," if you will.
It's about the thought process behind the coding and will
help you understand the symantic of much of the code that
passes through this site. Booch also provides a method for
designing programs...very important stuff for the beginner.
As you grow, you will choose to use or discard Booch's
suggestions for design and implementation.
It was my first computer book and I use it extensively
in my Perl programming. I just ignore the Ada and generate
Perl for the examples.
--moo