Hidden Treasures of the Perl Core, part 1, part 2.

I started a "learning Perl" project a few months ago where I planned on reading every page of several important Perl books, taking notes on bits I didn't feel I know well enough to use. I had also intended to study all of the built-in functions and core modules-- not to memorize what I could always look up, but to become more familiar with what's available. There's often a point in learning Perl where it appears easier to hack together your own solution than go researching an official one. The key word here is "appears;" if it actually were easier, then it'd probably be better. But not knowing about File::Path, for instance, might cause an additional 45 minutes of work reinventing a function that's sitting right under your libs.

I made it all the way through Learning Perl, 3rd edition, and was surprised how much I didn't know. I knew pretty much all of the core material by heart, but there are some great nuggets in the footnotes.