Learning Perl

Okay so you might think what the hell has learning Perl got to do with my CCIE. Although it might be a bit of a distraction from my CCIE studies I believe that learning Perl will help my networking career. The senior engineer where I work now uses Perl to go out to all of our routers and automatically back them up. There are tools like CatTools and so on that already do this for you but he also uses it to interogate configs make changes and generally make managing the whole infrastructure a whole lot easier. So I think that Perl will really help me in my career, now the only problem is how to go about learning it. I am not really a programer at heart and I think that a book will be the best way for me to go about learning Perl. The book I am leaning towards is Learning Perl 5th Edition by O'Reilly so if anyone has any experience of this book or any others that would help me learn Perl, then please let me know.