I've been building websites with a friend for the last eight months or so. We've been building ASP pages using VBScript and an MS SQL Server database. Although the websites are all VBScript, I've been writing perl scripts for loading and dumping data, reverse engineering schemas, and some other data manipulation chores. My friend has been somewhat interested in perl but he has too much work to do at the moment to spend much time trying to learn it.

Recently, we had to enable imports and exports for a few of our tables. I talked him into letting me load perl on his server (I had been running my other scripts from my workstation) so I could do these with PerlScript. Perl is much better suited for manipulating CSV files than VBScript so I figured I could write a much better import routine with PerlScript than I ever could with VBScript. The routines I ended up writing make sure all of the required fields are there, allow for additional fields to be specified (they ignore fields that aren't in the database) and allow the fields to be in any order in the imported CSV file. I never would have been able to provide that much functionality with VBScript alone.

My friend saw what I had come up with and his interest in perl is a bit greater now. These websites are his business and he's very busy right now. I told him I would look for some tutorial sites that might get him started. I knew of one site called Perl in 20 pages but that is geared more towards someone with a C/Awk/Shell background than a lifetime Windows/VisualBasic user.

I'm looking for recommendations for perl tutorial type websites that are geared towards someone that is familiar with Visual Basic/VBScript. Book recommendations would also be appreciated. I can give him my copy of Programming Perl and I'll probably pick up Learning Perl. What other sites or books would you recommend for someone with a VB background?