This is my habitual resource for the subset of Perl that I use most. It is a well organized instruction book that also serves nicely as a reference. I'll need to have my copy hard-bound before long. I highly recommend it for newcomers to this important programming language. Oriented towards sophisticated manipulation of strings (text), this language should appeal to everyone on The Library Thing. If printf() alone would make the C language worth learning, regular expressions do likewise for Perl.