:-), now sign up for Monks (it's free). I think my turning point in Perl was when I joined this site. These guys are AWESOME, and we all just want to pass the knowledge along.
Once you really learn Perl, I promise, you won't want to use any other language, and you will probably think you can solve all problems with it. Indeed, once I thought I saw a decent argument for NOT using it. A guy had an algorithm that indeed ate a lot of computation time when he emulated the c function that he had. In c the function took about 4 seconds. In Perl it took over 10 minutes to run. Ugly... but then a gent showed how to use the Inline::C module to compile that C code into a library that Perl linked to at run time and bingo.. the whole program ran in 4 seconds. I was hooked on Perl at that moment.
JamesNC