I am a firm believer that people learn best by doing. However, if you have no idea what you are doing the learning curve may get the better of you. I think you have taken the first step correctly ("Learning Perl" by O'Reilly). Try these steps:
1) read a lot
2) code a little
3) test a lot
4) repeat
There are many other resources to help you other than books, although it's hard to beat some of the O'Reilly books like "Programming Perl", "CGI Programming with Perl", "Advanced Perl Programming", "Perl Cookbook", "Programming the Perl DBI", etc. There is also an excellent book by Lincoln Stein called "Network Programming with Perl". Other resources may include www.PerlMonks.org, of course, www.perldoc.com, learn.perl.org and Google. Good luck and remember "There's more than one way to do it."

There's another good book I forgot to mention. It has nothing to do with Perl but everything to do with programming (even though it wasn't written for that purpose). It's called "A Whack on the Side of the Head" by Roger Von Oech. This book will help you unlock the mind for innovation and push you in the right direction for developing logical algorithms It goes right along with the idea of "There's more than one way to do it".

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.