Some more ideas for advancing your knowledge of Perl:
- Write an RFC for Perl6
- XS: integrating Perl and C
- Cross-platform Perl: common issues and how to deal with them (a hot topic in the Monastery today :)
- Graphical interfaces with Perl: Tk, Win32::GUI, et al.
- DBI: database access in Perl
- Profiling with Devel::DProf and dprofpp
Will you keep us informed about your independent study? I bet lots of monks besides just me will be interested in hearing your studies.