A buddy of mine wants to learn Perl. He asked me how to go about it. I told him:

To learn Perl, you must first write Perl code.

This was seconded by another buddy of mine who writes a lot of good Perl code. It's very zen, but not helpful. The problem is that this is exactly how I learnt to write Perl. At my very first job I had to implement something in Perl and I pretty much just jumped into it and waded and stumbled around until I figured it out.

I was thinking that the best way for him to learn Perl would be to do a small project in Perl. The problem is, I can't think of anything that would be a good starter-project in Perl. For just basic learning and understanding concepts, I have recommended going to PerlMonks, to read Learning Perl, and also to look at Perl Best Practices.

Aside from this, I think a good starter-project would be useful for him to get a grasp of the language. Any suggestions?