Teach Yourself Perl in 24 hours (2nd edition). This was the book I first bought and the one I'd recommend if you want to learn Perl. It covered all the bases without getting bogged down in to much extraneous detail. I have an attention span of about 5 minutes and if I'm not hooked within that time like as not I'll loose interest. With TYPi24hrs you begin writing short practical scripts and each chapter introduces another 'tool' for your toolkit; other 'learning perl' books from that well known Perl publisher have left me feeling like I'm climbing up a mountain just to get to the starting post.  

From the material covered in the TYPi24hrs book I gained enough practical knowledge of Perl to write the script we use at work that converts a CSV file of student records into an LDIF import file used to create Netware accounts. We're used that script for over four years during which time it as probably created over 40,000 user accounts.  I've recently rewritten it to help automate the creation of user accounts under Windows since we've finally moved away from Netware.

Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours, 2nd ed. (the one I bought) Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours, 3rd ed. (not seen but updated to cover Perl 5.8) Three other books that I'd recommend Effective Perl Programming - ISBN: 0201419750 Elements of Programming with Perl - ISBN: 1884777805 Object Oriented Perl - ISBN: 1884777791

Net-SNMP module

My perl Scripts

perl links