Eh, well my strategy thoughout learning Perl, was to play with examples. Then as I needed to learn more, to understand the examples, I would delve into the docs. I say get the big picture first, then get the details as needed. That way it's fun, because you can start using Perl at a pretty high level right away..... sort of like Perl ... the Montessori method, rather than Perl ... Catholic gradeschool method. :-)

There are many paths to the same destination. I started before google was big, but now with that search engine available, you can learn Perl by just Googling for the right keywords. It will give you alot of sample code to play with, and often explanations better than you will get in any book.