Perl is essentially a pigdin or creole language composed of C, shell, awk, sed and POSIX concepts with bits of Lisp thrown in.

If you know Unix, you will already know about 80% of perl. If you know Perl well, you already know a lot of Unix concepts.

Perl is a pain to learn if you don't have a solid Unix background. However, IME, if you acknowledge the sources Perl draws from, look at how they're integrated, and spend some time learning the underlying technical culture, it actually simplifies the learning process.

Interestingly enough, it's also easier to learn a natural language if you spend some time learning the underlying culture.