I wanted to write a program for a 21st century Family Photo and History Book. Chose Perl only because my brother said it could be done in Perl, no other reason.

Grabbed the Learning Perl, Programming Perl, Perl Cookbook (the most helpful IMO), Perl/TK and then a bunch more (mostly OReilly) books. Bought a bunch of computer parts and figured out how to make Linux work. I read all kinds of MAN stuff in the Bash Shell in Linux. There are alot of answers there. Used Google a gazillion times. Just kept writing code until it all worked, then have kept improving it.

Year and a half later, I gotta say I am astounded by Perl, and had no clue what a cool thing I was learning.