I don't think you can become "the next Randal Schwartz" overnight. Achieving such a level of expertise takes time and, above all, practice, practice, practice. I have been programming perl for over 5 years now, and very intensively for the last two, and I still get surprised by the things I learn every day (particularly in this forum).

I have almost every O'Reilly book on perl and a couple of others, and they have all been very useful at some point. I consult my camel book and my cookbook every day. If you think the cookbook is a bunch of man pages strewn together, you have obviously never used it. It is one of the richest sources of "how to do it" that I have seen for Perl. The camel book in many places resembles manual pages, but it also contains a lot of other information.

So here's what I would suggest:

• Get a few good perl books and use them.
• Hang around perlmonks, ask questions and post replies.
• Practice, practice, practice.

--ZZamboni