Ugh.. I really mean it then. Please, please don't learn Perl as your first programming language. It's a horrible, horrible first programming language. It teaches you all the wrong ways to do things and you'll end up writing bad code for the rest of your life.

(Seriously, all of the programmers I know who learned Perl first, even if they went on to other languages later, no matter how brilliant they may be, are some of the worst programmers I've known.)

I strongly recommend starting with something else like Python (or Java, or Ruby, or even C if it comes to that). Later, if you feel you need to, come back to Perl, after you've got some foundation in more sane languages..