Hello and welcome back :)

I got myself a subscription to Active State and sprung for the Komodo IDE, and I even got a subscription to The Perl Journal.

I hate to break it to you, but in my humble opinion all of the above are a total waste of money. I don't have a very high opinion of the perl journal, and I can definately say it isn't great for those just getting into Perl. As for fancy IDEs and subscriptions to Active State, you'd be better off without them. All they do is serve as roadblocks to learning.

I just wondered if instead of spending the $500.00 or so, if there was a simple guide,that held my hand and walked me through the initial learning curve.

Definately. In fact there are several extremely good resources. The obvious one is where you're currently posting. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the documentations with Perl is just about the best I've seen with any language (and its free). It may look very overwhelming at first, but break into into bite-sized chunks (start with perlintro, work your way up), and it's easy to swallow. The other excellent resource I can think of is safari, they have an awesome selection of Perl books (all the essentials, and almost all the ones even worth reading) and it's extremely cost-effective, check it out.

Also, I'd recommend against going out and buying 5 books at a time on any subject unless you're an extremely fast speed reader being thrown into solitary for a couple weeks. You'll always end up regretting some of the purchases. Personally out of the over 100 programming books I've bought, I'm glad I bought about 5 of them. Better off to look for online resources, then if necessary pick up a book or two afterwards.

Good luck! :)