Once you get going a bit, there are two others that I would thoroughly recommend:

1. Perl Best Practices, by Damian Conway. This one will teach you all the good habits to get into whilst writing Perl code, so that your code becomes readable, robust and maintainable.
2. The Perl Cookbook, by Christiansen & Torkington. Literally hundreds of "pre-cooked" recipes for solving some of the most common problems with Perl.

Oh, and you might be interested in the results of this fairly recent poll :)

Cheers,
Darren :)

I just wanted to emphasize that recommendation for "The Perl Cookbook": you'll certainly want some sort of tutorial ("Learning Perl" or one of it's competitors), but the "Cookbook" needs to be high on the list right after that, possibly even before the Camel itself. You're in a position where you need to get productive quickly, and the "Cookbook" is ideal for that -- it is not, by the way, just a canned list of recipies, each recipie comes with a short article explaining what's going on: perfect for learning as you go.

"Best Practices" is a good book also, though myself I find that I have at least minor disagreements with quite a few of it's recommendations (perhaps as much as 20%).

Also, the perl online documentation is generally pretty good and includes a number of "tutorial" articles on different subjects. On a unix box try a "man perl", that brings up a directory of the different man pages, with a section on "tutorials" right near the top.

Learning Perl, published by O'Reilly & Associates, affectionately known as the Llama Book is a great starting point. In my opinion, you'll want to start with it, and then migrate to the Camel book. After that, you'll probably end up wanting to buy books that target more specific categories. For example, if you're looking into database programming in Perl, there's the DBI book. And if you're looking into CGI, there's a book for that too.

Books rock, but aren't the only way to learn. There are many excellent suggestions for online resources in the node Where and how to start learning Perl, by woolfy. Personally, I really like the training materials assembled by Perl Training Australia - sometimes their explanations "click" better for me than those found elsewhere.

HTH,

Update: Sorry I mean the llama book (Learning Perl) not the camel book (Programming Perl). I have both. They are very good.

Definitely read The Camel. Not sure the Lama is so important if you have a little programming under your belt. But also get a copy of the Perl Pocket Reference! Whenever you can't remember the syntax for something the Pocket Reference is far and away the quickest way to find it (unless you are using something like Komodo with CallTips turned on).

And, as others have suggested, hang out at PerlMonks. Read the tutorials. Ask questions. Chat in the CB. Answer questions - there's nothing like answering someone else's question to learn how to do something :).

Enjoy your time with Perl.

Perl is most at home on Unix, and it shows in the language. If you're not familiar with Unix, then I think you should start there. Not that I can recommend a good book, cos I disremember what I used. Then, as others have said, check out the Llama book. I don't think anyone suggested Effective Perl Programming, which is an old but excellent book. It will help you learn to program in a perlish way instead of just thinking VB or C# in your head and translating it directly. Given that you're an experienced programmer, you'll probably not need the Llama for very long, so consider reading it on Safari instead of in dead-tree format.

What you should move on to after that depends on the tasks you've got to do.

Don't forget about the online documentation. perldoc -f functionname to get the docs on a built-in function; perldoc Module::Name for the docs on a module; and perldoc -q keyword to search the FAQs. That last one is particularly useful and not as well-known as it should be.