I can't add to the excellent recommendations for books. As for IDE's, I've used a couple. One is Open Perl IDE, which apparently is written only for Windows. Another is ActiveState's Komodo. You have to pay for Komodo, but there is a "personal" version that is fairly inexpensive. Komodo has versions for Linux and Windows. ActiveState issues per-user licenses, meaning you can put their products on as many computers as you want, as long as you're the only one using them. This is handy in case you've got a Windows and a Linux box, for example.