In my experience, one should start not at Perl (well-known) books, like Camel book.
One should first learn bash, sed and AWK, because Perl is a hodge-podge of features from these 3 languages.
A classic book about AWK by Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger. I think any Perl fan should read it, because AWK is like a Perl's granddad. Also, this book is well-written and AWK is smaller and more concise language than Perl. I love it for small command-line tasks.
I had my 'aha' moment when I read this book about AWK. Only then I understood why Perl is such a language. Larry Wall started Perl when he hacked AWK, because he wanted more features.
Needless to say that AWK is sometimes dubbed as a "command-line spreadsheet". Indeed, it was created for Unix to process all sorts of statistical and accounting data, supplied in tabular form. And this is the heritage of Perl. Larry Wall probably had the same type of tasks.
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