Over the years I’ve learned a number of programming languages on my own, including Perl. One learning tool I figured out is to use some sort of language reference to avoid the frustration of working through several chapters in a manual just to figure out a starting point.
Another good learning trick is to find a Perl program that does something similar to what you want to do, then play with it to gradually modify its behavior, using your reference when you get stuck. Eventually you become able to start from scratch after you’ve formulated some idea of what you want to do, and then translate that into a set of programming instructions.