Sometime on Jun 24, NMK cobbled together some glyphs to say:
Perl: "Learning Perl", "Programming Perl"(the de-facto standard) and "Advanced Perl Programming" (all by Oreilly). Those should turn you into
Talking about perl. These are a bunch of guys who hate answering questions, and this was one of the early newsgroups I hung out on.
The results: 1. People there will either flame you or killfile you if you're not careful 2. An insanely huge amount of documentation.
In fact, the documentation is so huge, that it would take you almost a decade to need a book or ask a question on a mailing list - by which time you'll be an expert anyway. The problem of course is that not too many people like reading online docs, and of those that do, most don't realise that the docs are all on their own box so they don't even have to search the web for it, you just need to know the name of the doc... but then that's what /perltoc/ is for :)