Back when I was working, my employer paid for me to go to OSCON, and I actually won a copy of the Perl Cookbook. It's still the go-to book for me to quickly look up how to do common tasks.
I hadn't seen "Perl Best Practices" but Damian Conway is brilliant and engaging, so I'm sure it's a great book. The book that helped me really get a "feel" for Perl when I was first learning was "Effective Perl Programming" by Hall & Schwartz, and I expect it covers the same ground. There are links to sample chapters in the sidebar of Hall's blog (http://effectiveperl.blogspot.com/).
My local bookstore will occasionally put O'Reilly books on half-off clearance. If you like, I can keep my eye out for discounted Perl books to send your way.
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I hadn't seen "Perl Best Practices" but Damian Conway is brilliant and engaging, so I'm sure it's a great book. The book that helped me really get a "feel" for Perl when I was first learning was "Effective Perl Programming" by Hall & Schwartz, and I expect it covers the same ground. There are links to sample chapters in the sidebar of Hall's blog (http://effectiveperl.blogspot.com/).
My local bookstore will occasionally put O'Reilly books on half-off clearance. If you like, I can keep my eye out for discounted Perl books to send your way.