Everyone else has had great recommendations on what to read. I must recommend that you do.

Pick a little project that you think you can handle in an evening, and spend some time getting those hands dirty. Start with a rough idea written in POD in 5 minutes, code until it's feature-complete, then code-complete, then zero-defect, then document-complete.

Some ideas off the top of my head:

• find out the ten most common file types on your whole computer hard drive
• write your own wc command, complete with character, word and line counts for a given text file
• fetch a web page from a given url and strip out all the font tags

If you're not using a freshly-installed CPAN module, a hash of lists, and more than one regular expression, you may be shortchanging yourself.

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