I presume you have already found the Tutorials section here. Once you are beyond the stage of simply closing your eyes or hurriedly looking away at the sight of a chunk of Perl script I strongly recommend that you look at the questions and answers in the Seekers of Perl Wisdom section here. That will give you a wide exposure to applications of Perl from the very mundane to the highly esoteric - just pick the questions you feel somewhat comfortable with or that seem applicable to your area of interest and then squeeze all the juice out that you can get.

Using Seekers of Perl Wisdom as a learning resource is a really good way of finding out about a lot of tricks, traps and generally cool stuff as well as getting a good feel for how to write practical Perl well.

Perl for Sysadmins, ISBN 9781565926097 and Minimal Perl: For UNIX and Linux People, ISBN 1932394508 are worth picking up. Quite a few of the online tutorials give some awful advice which may, sometimes, get the job done but will cripple your growth and enjoyment of Perl. Ask questions here often and you'll get, usually, good advice from all kinds of perspectives and areas of expertise.

once you have learned a basic deal of Perl - no matter which book you read from - the Seekers of Perl Wisdom is such a great medium of interaction and learning since you are offered practical solutions from different perspectives for a coding problem that you faced while learning/working, this can allow you to explore areas where you can develop your coding style and give you better ideas. I have learnt a lot only by following the SOPW and I can never cease to learn new things every passing day from this section...

I'd emphasize that you organize this learning experience and make provision for reviewing your progress every other while in order to solidify the techniques you learn and facilitate picking up new ones and thus building on some solid base.

So welcome and have a nice Perl journey..

In my opinion, Perl is simply another tool in the toolbox, which may or may not replace your Shell scripts

I advocate writing all non-trivial new scripts in Perl, not shell. As for why, see Unix shell versus Perl.

Re learning Perl in general, a good place to start is learn.perl.org.

I advocate writing all non-trivial new scripts in Perl, not shell.
Absolutely, I totally agree.

The point I was trying to make was that shell scripts are ideal for simple stuff. And that it doesn't usually make sense to use Perl for those tasks... Unless those scripts are beyond two or three lines, or the shell doesn't provide enough power or control.

In otherwords, if the shell already provides what you need, there isn't much (or any) benefit in rolling your own, whether it be in Perl, VB, php, or any other scripting language...

Learning a new langauge by using it for new (always urgent) projects doesn't often work.

You find yourself sitting there frustrated to hell trying to work out how to do something trivial, that you know you could do in your old langauge almost without thinking, and you usually revert because of the time pressure.

And if you try coding all those nice-to-have-but-you've-never-found-the-time-for projects that have been kicking around, you'll never finish them because there's no pressure to do so.

Make a list of the old language programs that get most use or require most maintenance and sort them by loc ascending in a scratch/private directory. Then try setting aside 30 minutes a day or whatever suits your schedule and go through them one-by-one in order and do your best job of converting them to Perl. Don't sweat the detail of testing and robustness on your first pass. None is ever going to use them for real. The idea is to force yourself to just work out a way to tackle those familar tasks in the new language. As you go through them, you'll find better ways of doing things you've already done earlier. Maybe go back and update those earlier attempts..

One day soon you'll need to write something, and the Perl solution will pop into your head before the old language solution does. At that point, if the new script is anything other than a throw-away, you'll probably still need to write it in the old language because of testing/robustness. But then is the time to set up a more formal attempt to do the same thing in Perl in parallel, and perhaps post your attempts here for critical review.

I found the Perl Cookbook a great way to learn as it suits my, admittedly lazy, approach;)
The examples there and indeed the Seekers of Perl Wisdom here are great for exposing you to correct Perl idioms.
Like yourself I came to Perl from a Unix admin perspective with a knowledge of scripting and a little C. The difficulty you will encounter is that such knowledge predisposes one to write inefficient Perl ignoring the idioms of the language and so looking over better code will improve your own.
print "Good ",qw(night morning afternoon evening)[(localtime)[2]/6]," fellow monks."

When I started with perl, I had a copy of the Llama book (Learning Perl - it was very good back then, including material that isn't in the docs that come with perl, I presume the current edition is just as good) and quickly got a copy of the Camel book (Programming Perl - maybe not so useful these days now that everyone has enough screen space to edit their code in one window while using perldoc -f in another).

But most of my learning wasn't from those books. It was from finding and downloading other peoples' code that did almost what I wanted but not quite. To get exactly what I wanted, I had to read the code, understand how it worked, and fix it. So I read lots of code, gained a good understanding of it, and wrote a little bit. This was done at work, with deadlines, and it's purely by luck that I fell into using perl instead of any other language: I simply found perl stuff that almost worked before I found anything else that almost worked :-)

I don't guarantee that that will work for you, of course, but it's an approach that might be worth trying.

Welcome to the Monastery! For exercises or self-imposed homework, you may wish to peruse Re: Real Life Perl Exercises. Good luck!

BTW: any command to convert shell script to perl ?