Programming Perl is like driving. Sometimes you drive just for the joy of it, but mostly you're trying to reach a destination.
I give topics a large latitude. I've learned a lot of stuff periphrial to Perl. Perl without pipes,CGI,DBI, etc would be quite boring and limited. Same with
Dr. Drobbs, 5-10% might apply to me but I still read the whole thing and usually somewhere down the road I can use some of it to do things I might never thought of before.
-Lee
"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."