Hi adamZ88,

Welcome to the monastery.

The first place to start would be https://learn.perl.org/, which has a lot of links to other sources of documentation, books, etc.

The "best" way to learn is going to depend on you, but many, many people have trod the path of the O'Reilly books, "Learning Perl", the Llama Book, "Programming Perl", the Camel Book, and then maybe on to Intermediate Perl or Advanced Perl.

The Perl documentation is very good for learning, for the beginner to the expert: try perldoc perlintro (or online at perlintro).

There's also Modern Perl online, for free, which assumes you know a little more about programming in general.

But in my opinion the best way to learn is to experiment, which is super-fun in Perl. Make a directory you can access in your shell, and start writing tiny programs to experiment with ideas and concepts that intrigue you that you see on this site or elsewhere. I've been building with Perl for more than 20 years, but last weekend I spent an hour making a silly script to find all the words in the dictionary in which all the letters of any other word appear in order, because I wanted to see how many words contain my name (only one: 'antischolastic').

Hope this helps!

edit: added links