The best book for learning the language is "Learning Perl" published by O'reilly. If you work through all the exercises you'll "know" perl well enough for doing

The best book for learning the language is "Learning Perl" published by O'reilly. If you work through all the exercises you'll "know" perl well enough for doing most things. Also helpful is the Perl Cookbook. Contrary to other advice, I didn't find Programming Perl (the camel book) as valuable as Learning Perl. You could learn via web and man pages but perl is weird enough so that the Learning Perl workout is valuable.