"On the job", I too, for practical reasons, kind of have to limit myself to the amount of Perl to Get The Job Done. On my own time, though, I'm always looking for nifty new things to experiment with, so I am always expanding my knowledge of Perl. There are two things, though, that have had an exceptional impact on what I've learned:
  1. PerlMonks. Seriously. Nothing helps you learn something better than teaching it to someon else. I have learned so much more here than most people here would know.
  2. Learning Perl's C/XS API. Seeing "behind the hood" and learning what makes each of Perl's little bits of magic work has allowed me a lot of insight into the ways that things are done. Optimizations, quirks and idioms kind of flow from that. Of course, a solid foundation in C programming helps immensely as well. It should be obvious to any "real" programmer that unshift will be considerably more expensive than push, but the thought never occurs to the introductory Perl novice.

In reply to Re: Ask Perlmonks: What should be included in an "Advanced Perl Independent Study"? by Fastolfe
in thread Ask Perlmonks: What should be included in an "Advanced Perl Independent Study"? by vroom

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.