This is advice I take very much to heart - as an inveterate reader and knowledge-sponge it is waaaaaayyy too easy for me to opt to "read another book" rather than actually DOING something. It is a big struggle for me (maybe the biggest ... marriage was a big one, too, but I've failed that'n twice), but with Perl I am trying to focus on "doing things" with some basic astronomical data, since astronomy is my #1 life-force-passion-devotion-thingie.
That sounds vague. Right now I am trying to really nail down the basics of the language by massaging, spindling and mutilating -- seeing what I can do to -- a copy of some observational data collected by the Saguaro Astronomy Club of Tucson, AZ. This is a collection that has been around for a long time and is used in some software created for amateur astronomers ... so it is looking forward to my "big goal" of trying to code an observation planning-and-logging application.