Hi Madanmeer,
If you want to learn a scripting language that will work in most other shells, learn bourne (/sbin/sh). Bash and Korn (and many others) completely support all Bourne syntax. Bash and Korn add some addition functionality which is very handy but that means that some functions in them won't work with each other or Bourne.
If you intend to work entirely on Solaris, it's relatively safe to work in ksh but I always prefer to use Bourne if at all possible
I would also applaud your idea to look into Perl, it's a very useful language, but would suggest that you instead look into Python. I learned Perl and never got round to learning Python but I'm told by people who's opinion I value highly that it's superior to Perl.
In addition, try to get a basic understanding of sed and awk to assist your shell scripting. Awk in particular is very powerful and can do a great deal on it's own, but even if you only learn how to search and print with it, it'll help you greatly.
Whatever you decide, good luck in your endevour and feel free to drop by and ask us if you get stuck on anything