If you are a Perl beginner, the Camel book is the weapon of choice. As Joost said you get to know "the perl way". Also it is far from a dry book and demonstrates every feature with lots of example code snippets.

The perl way is "There's more than one way to do it", and the Camel book is full of sequences like "You can do X with <code...>, or <code...>, but usually you would do <code...>". Because of this the reader gets to see any concept or function more than once, which is as close to learning by repetition as you can get without losing the fun of reading.

That said, if you are a beginner to programming at all, you should start with "Learning Perl" or a tutorial.

Also, if you are a hard worker, assigned problems help a lot. If not, you should try problems you would like to do (to keep your interest).