Perl possibly my favorite programming language. I picked it up by in 1995 ago from the excellent book Learning Perl. Since then I've worked two jobs where I got to use Perl, and it's always a treat.

Perl is a programming language like no other. It's flexible, fast, and powerful. It's the perfect mix between object orientation, procedural, and shell script. It's got easy, uniform access to system level resources, and yet it produces very portable code. It's got the most friendly syntax of anything I've ever seen. I know there's been a lot of buzz about Perl since it came out, but I'm still surprised there hasn't been more. It can take care of the millions of little thing that eat up so much of the time of technical people.

The best info source for Perl stuff I've found it at http://www.perl.org. They've got most everything you need to get started in perl. Including Perl itself. If you're looking for good books on Perl (or just about anything computer related) check out O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.; both the llama book and the camel book are great for picking up Perl.

My little Cid Filter project was done in perl. The cidfilter.pl script should hopefull put to rest the assertion that there exists no readable perl code.