Although I had taken a class in Pascal, Assembly (sounds scary but we didn't do much), and C, Perl is by far the first language that I came to know well enough that I can claim as a language I can say more they "Hello, world" with.

I asked the same question to others when I was at the stage you are in, and I got the same answer I'd also recommend to you. Find something you want to do with it then, solve learning problems as you come to them.

Also, I would suggest that if you haven't already, do all of the excercises in Learning Perl, check your program with their's, implement what you learn from their's into your own code, then mess with and make it do other things it "doesn't have to."

Above all, do something fun.

melguin.