Perhaps you would benefit from a good teacher. I've found that some topics I find confusing when taught by one person are obvious when taught by another.
I had a 3 days Perl formation with an excellent teacher (17 years ago). I do not code much in perl, but when someone in the buildong has a bug in a perl script, he comes to see me. I think the perl books are not very good for a beginner because they do not focus on the most usefull parts. The ideas behind the syntax makes it easy to remember (your whole life) once you have passed the first steps of learning.
