Perl has been a great tool for me. I was always good at shell scripts and before that, batch files and most other sorts of non-structured programming. Finding ways to automate all manner of things has always been something I like to do. After I finally topped out on shell scripting, Perl was the logical choice.

Perl was an easy language to gravitate towards because you can still use it without knowing any of the nuts and bolts. You can essentially write a Perl script in the same fashion you would write a shell script. One of my first scripts was to translate one of my shell scripts into Perl. Nearly a line-by-line rewrite. Although it makes my cheeks turn red to look at that script now, it ran in 4 seconds. The shell script took 1.5 hours for the *exact* same function. I knew I was on the right track.

After that, learning more Perl meant I was able to do better work. Eventually, I was helping *other* people do better work. People started appreciating what I was doing and started asking if I could help with other things. Learned some more Perl. Better work became possible.

All the while I was writing Perl as someone who had only dabbled in BASIC and derivatives as well as a bit of Pascal (so I could write "door" modules for my bbs software). But you can still use Perl with only a low-level understanding of programming. Someone at this skill level isn't going to be able to pick up C and just write a little snippet that wades through some database output.

The higher-level stuff in Perl is patient. When you're ready, it will be there for you. Especially if you have a monk or three to show you the way. ;)