Let me get it out of the way by saying that perl is a good language, right off, now, onto why you should learn C.

C is an excellent language, and it is important for many reasons. Anybody who questions its relevance to perl should download the source distribution and look at its contents... as it is written entirely in C.

C introduces many important concepts to programmers, but by no means do I believe that a programmer's training is complete in having mastered it.

One important thing is memory addressing. Memory addressing is an important concept. Another is typecasting. While typecasting is important to learn, types are not strongly enforced in C, as in it is not a "strongly typed" language. An example of a strongly typed language is Ada, a popular programming language that was developed for use in embedded systems (and is actually one of the better programming languages known to the world, it often gains criticism for being "clunky" or "awkward," but most Ada programmers would tell you it merely requires you to program correctly).

So, what am I saying and how does this relate to you? Learning C is a step in the right direction towards being a better programmer. It opens a realm of possibilities to you that you may never have considered before, such as writing operating systems, device drivers, and even 3D video games. This isn't to say that what you have learned from perl isn't good knowledge, and this isn't to say that you will know how to write an operating system just by knowing how to write C code (far from it), but anybody who hasn't learned C certainly could benefit from it.

Just Another Perl Backpacker