I've been programming perl since 2001 and worked for large fortune 100 companies. I have real world experience when it comes to the practical use case of application design and implementation.

Perl is mainly self taught but it is important to have readable code and to understand how memory and automatic garbage collection works. It is important to understand the IO such as disk and network requirements that may be part of the central of your program. It is important understanding the simple data types and how to check for those types in conditions inside the program and error handling. My experience is basically to design a prototype to get the idea and then improve the idea by development by testing. Premature optimization is something you want to avoid at the start of the application design. You want to get your idea out but always later improve the application and also use unit and integration testing or even your own scripts. Perl has these features and they help while you develop. It is important to create classes and objects so that your program can become extensible and you can reuse code for even other projects. It is important that you have a github so you keep track of commits. So I am a avid perl developer and always will be. It's my favorite programming language due to its linguistic nature.