Brand spanking new to PERL!

I have been in the networking side of the house for almost 9 years now, and have just taken a job in downtown Houston, TX. After not using a single language (other than CiscoIOS, which is a language unto itself!) since my FORTRAN days, I have been asked to learn PERL as fast as I can and my currrent list of projects to code are:

Completed and submitted for public-use!! A new syslog daemon for our PIX firewalls to talk to that will parse the incoming information based on severity and e-mail/page/ignore based on keywords, and log accordingly

an SNMP crawler to monitor traps on our switches for port bps statistics, and aggregate them into a sum total for the network for a consistent and highly available congestion report - Nothing but grief thus far!