Let's say that you, like me, are addicted to World of Warcraft, and you decide that you'd like to track the progress of your characters, or maybe your friends' characters, on your personal website.

You could hard code all that data, updating it whenever you have the time. Or, with some simple Perl scripting magic, you could automate the whole process! Learn more in this tutorial of how to read character information from the World of Warcraft servers.

"Pragmatic" can often mean "boring" -- but this in-depth look at building a web crawler in Perl is not boring at all. In fact, it's informative and a great example of a truly useful Perl application. Check out this fantastic tutorial from perlhobby: A pragmatic approach to writing a mp3 crawler in perl.

Here is some sound advice on Perl administration techniques that's worth a read. Pretty standard stuff, but if you're a programmer who's been double-tasked with maintaining the systems you work on, this will be helpful. Even if you're not a system administrator, I highly recommend that you learn to compile Perl yourself on your own systems. It's a good learning experience if nothing else.

Perl Best Admin Practices

A conditional is a control structure that will activate specific blocks of your code based upon whether your specified statement (or expression, or condition) evaluates to true or false. You can use these conditional statements to make logical decisions, or take specific actions based on available data. Learn more in this tutorial on using unless.