Assume that Perl has what you *want*

[tilly]

My (thankfully distant) memories of PL/SQL suggest that most of the time it has what you need to be able to get from point A to point B. That doesn't impress me.

What first impressed me about Perl was the fact that it consistently had ways to not just get from point A to point B, but it had ways to express the problem and answer that were far cleaner than the kludge that I would have thought up on my own.

So while PL/SQL generally had, somewhere, the minimum I needed, Perl typically had what I wanted, even if I didn't know it at the time.

Therefore I would suggest that newbies to Perl should take the attitude that somewhere in Perl or on CPAN there is an approach to this problem that you really want to use, you just don't know about it yet...