Re: A reasonable approach to getting a Perl skill foundation?

[eyepopslikeamosquito]

Apart from learning a new language, don't forget that you are leaving your workmates, and those who follow them, a long term code maintenance burden. Even if they learn Perl well, they may struggle to trouble-shoot production problems with your code, especially if they must be fixed urgently. Accordingly, you should consider what you can do to help them.

• Documentation. Make sure all your programs and modules are well-documented. Clear usage help (-h), with examples, for all commands in your suite is essential. I further suggest a comment block at the top of every large component explaining the background, intent, rationale, external references, etc.
• Logging/tracing. If you have not done so already, you should consider adding a logging facility to your programs. When trouble-shooting a production problem, or just to help understand how the program works, your workmates could then run your script (with a verbose flag, say) and it will spit out what it is doing in detail at each step, helping both in trouble-shooting and understanding how it works.
• Testability. When the new guys make a change to your code, how are they going to test it? You need to plan for this. If you already have a test suite, you could ask them, as a training exercise, to write some new tests.