Hi,

What you are saying happens to me too. I too keep forgetting stuff, but thats ok. Main thing is, and its a very important question that you must ask yourself "Do I really like programming/scripting or am I in it just for adding one more skill in my resume?". Cause if you just want to learn perl to merely add a skill without enjoying the pleasure and pain of the learning process, its really not worth it.

Its a very strange coincidence, but I happen to have a chat with a friend of mine a couple days ago. He too is trying to learn Perl and was talking stuff that you just spoke about.

I am a storage admin too, and started learning Perl cause I wanted to automate stuff. Job Pressure catches up with all of us, but thats how life is, and you gotta take it the way it is.

Even I get to work only on weekends, provided no other work comes up during that time. So what I do is I write scripts over and over again till it sort of becomes ingrained in my head. And do follow the advice of others here. Try to automate something. You'll be amazed with the amount of knowledge you will end up soaking.

One last thing, you mentioned something like If learning Perl will help? I dont know what you mean by that. I tried another scripting language which seems to be something everyone is chanting praises about, but it didnt work out for me. And this was last year around same time. So I tried Perl, found perlmonks and started working on scripts and asking questions here. And I am happy that I did it. I dont want to mention the name of the other language, its a great language, just that Perl works best for me.

So keep trying and it will work out