I am a Systems Administrator as such I do not program everyday. I have lifted/written/Cargoed the scripts I need for the moment. I'm not a terribly good or bad programmer but I would like to be good.

I "make things" to do at home. I write scripts to move files between my machines (OS X, FreeBSD, Win98) read log files, create address books I even do a little CGI junk (and I mean thartt literally) now and again.

I like Perl a lot. I "get" it. Randal Schwartz warns in Learning Perl (3rd) that Perl is not a good language to learn with if you aren't going to use it everyday.

I can't think of things to do with the language. Sometimes I download modules just to read the docs and use them. This probably isn't as great a learning experience as it may seem.

Lest we get to think I spend my nights and days hacking on a computer like some techno-golem; fear not I have a two year-old son who mainly likes to dig in the back yard or watch Bob The Builder do the digging with Scoop on the Bob The Builder website. And there's the biggest problem. Time.

What do you Monks suggest to a person trying to keep their skills "sharp" and improve? Where can I look to for inspiration, ideas or just uses for Perl?

What do you do? If anything.
--
ellem@optonline.net
There's more than one way to do it, but only some of them actually work.

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