I also ran into this problem. I started learning perl so that I could use it for various parts of my personal website. After I graduated this past May, I took a job as a web developer with a fairly large-scale company here in DC. Of course, perl was out of the question from the beginning and all coding was done in VBScript/ASP. It was difficult coding the ASP pages. Not because the language was difficult to learn, but because I could always think of a simpler, more straightforward approach in perl. Perl is just that type of language...it tends to work the same way you think.

1) I learned C/C++ while still in school. I haven't been able to find anything even remotely comparable to pm.org. The perl community is fortunate to have such a great website available to them. I've learned so much from this place. I'd invest in some good books if you're interested in learning C/C++.

2) I'd still continue to learn perl. There are many good reasons, but the most important: it's the coolest damn language in the world. Seriously though, perl has many useful applications. At my previous job, although I wasn't able to use perl for our websites, I still used perl to simplify a lot of tasks that were taking others 3-4 times as long. Stick with perl...you'll find uses for it.

I'd also search for other related nodes. I know I posted a discussion on this a while back as I was concerned just as you are. My new job is strictly C/C++ application development, but I still find room for a little perl.

HTH,
Eric