There are two O'Reilly books "Perl for Bioinformatics" and "Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics".

They are designed as an introduction to Perl programming for "Biologists" and in a lesser way are also designed as an introduction to "bio" for programmers.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mperlbio/

You can see them free online for a limited period by signing up to the "Bookshelf" service on the publisher's site.

http://www.bioperl.org - is a key site for those entering the world of bioinformatics programming - there's also a really good general Perl form - http://www.perlmonks.com/ where questions get rapid answers (as long as the answer isn't "Google it" or "Read the manual"....:-)

thanks for the info