Free Perl Book - Beginning Perl

Beginning Perl is a great free e-book by Simon Cozens and Peter Wainwright. The full text of the book is available in 14 chapters worth of PDF files (fair warning, you'll need Acrobat Reader to view the PDFs). It will take you from the absolute beginnings of Perl, to some of the more complex operations like connecting with databases and using Perl as a CGI language.

If you're just getting started, even with very little to no programming experience, I highly recommend giving at least a few chapters of this book a read.

Read Beginning Perl