I will admit that my introduction to Perl was picking up Programming Perl, getting less than a half-dozen pages through it, and my wife asked me what I wsa laughing about. After that I was clearly doomed. (Appreciating the humor is essential. For instance they have a simple test-grader and a comment about how it won't work properly if "Carol" appears twice. Carol was one of the few names that didn't appear twice in the sample input.)

But after a couple of years I went from Programming Perl to perldoc. You can grep online documents, and there is more there. And when I picked up a "free" copy of the third edition, I never read it.

However I still know the second edition well-enough to pick up a copy and quickly find the right page to settle arguments. (OTOH I am more likely to give people the appropriate perldoc command an instructions on what string to search for.)

Cheers,
Ben