Several months ago now I made work buy me a copy of Minimal Perl because it looked like it would be useful for formalizing the writing of small one off scripts.
It is.
At work we have some database imports that we do from Excel Spreadsheets supplied by the client. This process is mostly a manual process (for now), and it requires converting to CSV, making sure everything is Latin-1 and creating some SQL and YAML for our application. When I started taking over this process I took the opportunity to use the tools I learned. I now have three or four 40 line scripts that start with such gems as
#!/usr/bin/env perl -nasF/\t|,/
and have 30- lines of END block. I cannot reccoment Minimal Perl enough if like me you started with Perl as an Application Language (mod_perl) and want to pick up a good style for doing the quick-and-dirty hacks in a not-so-quick-and-dirty way.