This is precisely how I started using perl - making small and huge changes to hundreds or thousands of files simultaneously (which then made me think about how to make it such that such silliness wasn't repeated in so many files in case it changed again - which it has). I knew sed and awk, but they got far too convoluted far too quickly. I started with perlintro and went from there. Coming from C++, you should have no problem (which is my background as well, though I had been doing some shell scripting, too).