I'm an American teacher of English living in a small city 40 miles northwest of Barcelona. My website visca.com, mostly in Catalan, uses Perl and CGI.pm for a host of interactive pages. I've been using Perl since the Matt Wright days (How was a poor newbie to know?) and learned it mostly from comp.lang.perl.misc and the Camel book. Besides using Perl for interactive pages, I find it to be very useful munging text files. Since this textarea is quite large, I suppose I'm encouraged to give an example of how Perl makes life easier for me:

I have 350 lines of text like this:

9) burst into [suddenly enter] — entrar d'un cop a. ex.: He burst into
+ the room.
10) call for — 1 [demand] exigir. ex.: He called for an end of the war
+. 2 [pick up] anar a recollir. ex.: I'll call for you at six. 3 [be t
+he occasion for] ser ocasió de. ex.: This calls for an investigation 
+/ for a celebration.
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9) <b>burst into</b> [suddenly enter] — entrar d'un cop a. ex.: <b>He 
+burst into the room.</b><br>
10) <b>call for</b> — 1 [demand] exigir. ex.: <b>He called for an end 
+of the war.</b> 2 [pick up] anar a recollir. ex.: <b>I'll call for yo
+u at six.</b> 3 [be the occasion for] ser ocasió de. ex.: <b>This cal
+ls for an investigation / for a celebration.</b><br>
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while (<F>) {
  chomp;
  if (m~ 1 ~) {
    s~\) (.+) \—~) <b>$1</b> —~g;
  }
  else {
    s~\) (.+) \[~) <b>$1</b> [~;
  }
  s~(exs?)\.: (.+?)\.~$1.: <b>$2</b>.~g;
  s~([A-Z].+?(\.|\?|\!))~<b>$1</b>~g;
  print G "$_<br>\n";
}
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