I learned Perl the same way Palmer learned PHP. My script of choice was the Ultimate Guest Book. I doubled the size of the admin .cgi file, and significantly enlarged one other file. I hacked that script into a beast. And guess what.. I don't use Perl anymore. =P
I honestly can't say that I know anyone who knows a language well enogh that they never have to look at the manual.. There are always those small things you want to double check. Like "Is it needle then haystack, or haystack then needle for in_array()?"
[BTW, for
in_array() it's needle then haystack. Whereas in
strstr(), it's haystack then needle.]