Keep Higher Order Perl for later. It's great but far too much for a 2nd book when getting started. The camel book Programming Perl is still a great start which adheres to the layered aspect. Don't read all of it, just a few parts as needed. I recommend to add Perl Cookbook early, to look things up as you go - it gives idiomatic-ish ideas of how you might do X in Perl. Perl comes with a mountain of very complete and useful man pages: you start with looking things up in the camel book, then transition to looking them up in the man pages.