A good amount of folks seem to have begun their Perl journey with CGI programming. For me, it was at the opposite end of the web site. I wanted to spider, download, and archive websites. I was aware of wget -r, but there were certain aspects to it I didn't like (How foolish of me! If only I knew the multitude of wget options... of course, I was still learning the ropes of Linux and unix in general at the time).

I started out writing horrible cargo-cult scripts that did the wrong thing the wrong way. They were ugly, and slow. They were a maintenance nightmare. But they worked! They performed a needed function, and I loved it. I was creating utilities to make my life easier! It was empowering.

Now I've been using Perl for nearly 5 years. I am able to understand an astonishing (to me, anyway) amount of what I read here and elsewhere, and have begun to actually create what I think is decent code (I still mostly use Perl for the same purpose -- small but highly useful unix command line utilities).

Compared to my many previous false-starts at learning other languages, picking up Perl was very natural. I think it's an excellent language to learn, if only for the ease with which useful things can be created.