I got started on Perl by using Slashcode (before it was called that - a 0.3-pre-release tarball that was very explicitly unsupported by its author) to build a proof-of-concept site for a research group at the UK's Open University, as a summer job during my degree at neighbouring De Montfort University's MK campus. It took a lot of support from the #linpeople channel on irc.linpeople.org (now known as irc.freenode.net), but I did get the prototype system up and running, and the team got their grant to build the next phase of the project. And I got to learn Perl - although possibly not by the easiest or best route :)

This question seems to have combined with the Iron Man challenge and lead to even more responses. Too bad most of these stories are several years old at this point; Proud To Use Perl would probably have loved to collect them otherwise!

I wanted to do CGI on an Apache on Windows server. Languages like Pascal didn't seem very appropriate for the job so I learnt Perl from a "Dummies" book. Once I'd got beyond "Hello World" I got a lot of help and feedback and ended up a lot better with Perl than Pascal (where I started from).

I don't technically use Perl in my day job - it's not on my job description - but I do actually use Perl a lot at work to get stuff done. So far I've used it to replace two Java applications and a VisualBASIC one. For the past year I've done a lot of Perl to create hardware abstraction layers between medical pumps and the SAP Quality sub-system. Great fun and quite productive.

--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam