Advice about Perl? But I have so much other advice to give to my 12 year old self... (like "You'll meet this one girl -- avoid her" ;) )

I'm not really sure. I started programming Perl after I graduated from college with a BS in CS, so my style was alredy pretty much set. It took me some time to learn the Perlish way to do certain things (and I am still learning), but for the most part I think my code has been pretty good so far.

I can always think of PerlMonks, though.