I worked with Perl for years, and I don't recommend it for a beginner. There are just too many idiosyncrasies that belong specifically to the language that you'd be better off with Python for learning the basics.

I'm also not really sold on that book, which from the code samples looks really old. I'd recommend two books: Modern Perl and Perl Best Practices.

Edit: I'd also recommend working in Go but potentially the way i/o intersects with interfaces makes it a bit more challenging.