What's the best way to learn perl for a python programmer?

[john_sips_tea at yahoo.com]

The online docs are very good. Just run "perldoc perl", and then go
through the various tutorial pages (starting with "perldoc perlintro").
You can also read them online here: http://perldoc.perl.org/perl.html .

Then go to http://www.perlmonks.org . They have many tutorial-style
articles there, as well as a very helpful and knowledgeable community.

If you absolutely need to write object-oriented Perl, you probably want
to keep things as simple as possible and just use regular old
hash-based objects. Writing OO Perl code is a whole nuther ball of wax
than just writing procedural Perl code.