While getting to know the built-in functions of Perl is very important, I would also suggest that, once you are comfortable with the core functions, getting into the habit of with working with CPAN modules is also very important. I've been coding Perl for quite some time and counted about 80 of the functions that I've used in the past. But most of the new problems I come up against are complicated enough that I don't want to learn how to use the additional 136 functions to solve them. So I let someone else use them and use their CPAN modules instead. I just went back trough the past year and it looks like I've installed a new CPAN module a month and I probably look at two or three a month that I don't install.

I'm not by any means suggesting that it wouldn't be a good idea to perldoc perlfunc every so often to refresh your memory, I just think that CPAN is one of the most valuable tools of a Perl developer and I found that it took some time to get comfortable with the idea of jumping in an learning the interface to someone else's module.

perl -e 'split//,q{john hurl, pest caretaker}and(map{print @_[$_]}(joi
+n(q{},map{sprintf(qq{%010u},$_)}(2**2*307*4993,5*101*641*5261,7*59*79
+*36997,13*17*71*45131,3**2*67*89*167*181))=~/\d{2}/g));'
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