Working Through the Llama

I've been working my way through the llama book, which has indeed filled in some gaps. The camel is also helping to clarify, though it is truly an advanced book and if I had not already done so much reading about Perl, Unix, and programming, and had not been sitting around thinking about Perl so much, I think the learning curve would be too steep. Anyway, here is the chapter list for the llama:

1. Introduction
2. Scalar Data
3. Lists and Arrays
4. Subroutines
5. Input and Output
6. Hashes
7. In the World of Regular Expressions
8. Matching with Regular Expressions
9. Processing Text with Regular Expressions
10. More Control Structures
11. File Tests
12. Directory Operations
13. Strings and Sorting
14. Process Management
15. Perl Modules
16. Some Advanced Perl Techniques

I've made it through Chapter 5 - Input and Output, but I'm not as behind as I think, since my other research has given me some introduction into hashes and regular expressions. I notice that there are three chapters devoted to regular expressions alone. Perl was originally intended as a text processing language, and regular expressions (as I've mentioned) are key to those features. As I've also mentioned, I'm a global learner, so seeing the "big picture" is key for me having any sort of grasp on the detailed concepts (which logically fall into place for me once I have the big picture). It seems that the experience of learning Perl is teaching me a lot about how I learn unfamiliar things.