Perl is useful to know even if you don't get a job from it. It is *certainly* worth taking the time to learn. Should it be the _only_ language you learn? No. No language should. Learning a variety of languages, preferably from different language families, improves your programming skills in all of them. At minimum, you want to learn a low-level language (assembler or C), a higher-level procedural or structured-programming language (e.g., Pascal), a functional language (preferably something from the Lisp family), an object-oriented language (e.g., Smalltalk or Inform), and a multiparadigmatic language (Perl being likely the best choice here). With each language you learn it gets easier to learn more, so once you've checked off a language for each of those categories you can worry about which ones are going to get you jobs and add them too. Oh, and as far as getting jobs, the best investment you can make is probably SQL, because it's so incredibly easy to learn and yet also useful and in-demand. But you can't program your way out of a paper box if SQL is _all_ you know.