In Theory . . . .

This is not exactly a complaint. But . . .

I'm learning Perl now, along with sed and awk and regular expressions, and I'm noticing that in nearly all cases, these books are aimed at people who have real-life problems that can be solved by these functions. At this point, I don't. I have not yet worked in an environment in which I need powerful searching and text processing and programming tools. Each of the books is very basic and approaches the subject from the view of a non- or new programmer, which is helpful. But the examples are things like "$apple = 'red'" and replacing the variable "$foo" with the text "bar." While simple and illustrative, I'm having trouble at this point imagining real life situations where I would apply these skills.

I guess what I need is to talk to people who use these skills and have them show me how they work, but for now I can only learn these in my theory-bubble.