One of my first major achievments in Perl was to take a number of recipes (as in cooking) that my uncle had typed up into a word file and pipe the output of antiword to my custom perl script which parsed the recipes and put them in my database. (Antiword just takes a word file and outputs it in a text-only format) Sure, it's probably not the best example but it was quick, it was easy and got me hooked on Perl.