Recently I had the good fortune of being sent on a Perl Course and I must say I have much respect for this robust scripting language.  It is very versatile, and I like that since I know C programming, I understood and could follow the code during the course. After reading a bit more, I find that Larry Wall (Perl inventor) actually wrote Perl and derived from C as well as a couple of Unix utilities such as sed, awk, etc.

Below is a couple of quotes that can explain what Perl is better then I, so read ahead, then check out the tutorials.

To borrow a quote from Doug Sheppard (see his Beginner tutorial links below) explaning what PERL is :

Perl is the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages: powerful and adaptable. It was first developed by Larry Wall, a linguist working as a systems administrator for NASA in the late 1980s, as a way to make report processing easier. Since then, it has moved into a large number of roles: automating system administration, acting as glue between different computer systems; and, of course, being one of the most popular languages for CGI programming on the Web.

And another quote explaining Perl taken from the documentation :

Perl is a high-level programming language with an eclectic heritage written by Larry Wall and a cast of thousands. It derives from the ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent from sed, awk, the Unix shell, and at least a dozen other tools and languages. Perl’s process, file, and text manipulation facilities make it particularly well-suited for tasks involving quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical programming, networking, and world wide web programming. These strengths make it especially popular with system administrators and CGI script authors, but mathematicians, geneticists, journalists, and even managers also use Perl. Maybe you should, too.

Beginners Introduction to Perl Part 1 :: Part 2 :: Part 3 :: Part 4 :: Part 5 :: Part 6 by Doug Sheppard over at Perl.com

Perl 5 Tutorial (PDF) by Chan Bernard Ki Hong

Perl and CGI by Abby Buell

Compilation of Perl Documentation (large file 6+ megs)

Although not for beginners you should know that there is a large repository of everything that is Perl over at CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network).  Before you start writing modules and such, head on over to CPAN and see if someone else has already written or is doing what you want to do, and just download the module and link it to your Perl script.  There are tonnes and tonnes of excellent modules located here that let you do almost anything.  Once you start really getting into Perl, this site it a must.