Zigster,

Why not use the existing questions in the areas mentioned by mrmick? In other words, consider looking at the questions and then deriving your own answers before reading the existing ones?

Also, think about various things you do from time to time. For example, I've worked on the following puzzles for my own amazement and education:

• A Gift Registry for my family site, one my in-laws, wife, and daughter can use to track wish-list items for Christmas, Birthday, and other holidays
• A decimal to hex converter that you can plant on your personal site and use from work, home, or wherever
• A POP3 email reader so you can access multiple email accounts from a single location
• A file listing program that sorts web pages by various criteria (age, filesize, last modification, etc.)
• A spider that polls certain sites for stock quotes and then writes the results to a personal page
• Another spider that collects the daily comic from various sites (Dilbert, User Friendly, etc.)
• A "telephone/contact" tracker so I can access email addresses, phone numbers, etc from my personal site.
• A bookmark organizer, again sharing links between home and the office
• A link verifier for maintaining link pages on a site
• A 404 Error registration system so I can know when users hit bad links on my sites
• A Yahtzee-style dice game.
• A cataloging system for tracking my comic books, my CD's, and my games.

And so on. Look at your daily life and see what types of information you normally need access to. If you can't think of anything there, then consider system maintenance tools (such as deleting all *.bak files or checking CPAN for newer versions of modules you've installed.), or hobby "helpers" (if you play RPGS, then how about a character generator. If you collect stamps, then a stamp database. Etc.) Bottom line: look for an interesting problem and then try to solve it.

By the time you do three or four such exercises, you should gain some confidence with the language, begin developing a personal styles, and start collecting a set of routines you reuse between projects.

If you can't think of anything that interests you, well, how about obtaining a copy of "Learning Perl" or "The Perl Cookbook" and then typing in the examples/recipes? When I did this, I found many different avenues of exploration and went from there.

--f

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