Perl has a number of books, but the one that seemed most useful to me is Intermediate Perl because it covers Perl's object orientation and references in great d

Perl has a number of books, but the one that seemed most useful to me is Intermediate Perl because it covers Perl's object orientation and references in great detail. To learn the basics of the language either spend money for Learning Perl (which I would not recommend you do) or use the online tutorials and websites. Honestly though for web development, unless you either have a legacy Perl code base you have to work with or are already a Perl guru, nearly every other option for web programming will run faster and have lower maintenance costs (in time and effort) than Perl. Since you know PHP and have dabbled with Ruby and Python, why not take a look at Seaside Smalltalk or PLT Scheme? Seaside: http://www.seaside.st/ PLT Scheme: http://www.plt-scheme.org/