I agree with the advice to read Higher Order Perl, but read Wall's (Blue Camel) book Programming Perl first. Both are fun to read, but I found HOP much more us

I agree with the advice to read Higher Order Perl, but read Wall's (Blue Camel) book Programming Perl first. Both are fun to read, but I found HOP much more useful after reading Wall's book. If you don't already know regular expressions, read Mastering Regular Expressions. Then for additional ideas try the Perl Cookbook, also from O'Reilly. For additional inspriration along the lines of Higher Order Perl, read On Lisp by Graham, which is not about Perl, but shows how the same concepts and more are elegantly applied in Lisp. The web documents Higher Order Javascript and the Little Javascripter are interesting if you want to also understand that Javascript, like Perl is fun in the same ways that Lisp is.