What method(s) have proved most successful for you?

Same method I use to learn almost anything I do with some notable exceptions. Read up on it, talk to a few folks already doing it, and go do it. Taking up skydiving or something like that needs more hands on instruction! :-)

My method of learning Perl was to take a collection of Korn shell scripts that I used to do my backups at AT&T Bell Labs and convert it to Perl. My goal being to eliminate all the pipes and temporary files that I was using to get the job done. Part of the task was tracking what files systems and files were being backed up to what media in an HP Magnetic/Optical disk jukebox across 32 slots.

One of the clever things that the backup method used in the end was to create a partition on one of the pieces of media that contained everything to recreate the backup and restore suite that I had created including building Perl itself. But I digress.

Over the years I wrote Perl scripts in a vacuum of sorts because I was the only one in my immediate circle writing the stuff. That was until I ended up at Perl Monks. Then I found out that a lot of what I was doing was not ideal. (I won't say wrong... just could have been better.) So it is here at PM that I was able to hone my skills getting feedback from other Perl folk at my meager attempts and scripting.