Nice! My first big Perl program was an IRC bot named GoatNuts back in '96/'97.
I learned a lot of Perl from Randall Schwarz (Programming Perl, O'Reilly) himself (who was doing community service for 'hacking' intel) in the #perl chanel on EfNet! Later hung out with him at a mutual friends party and he was an absolute asshat. Best lessons from Randall were to use strict; and always run with the -w flag and then heed and fix the warnings. When you can write beautiful strict perl with no warnings the code is much easier to maintain.
Met Larry Wall (author of Perl) at The Perl Conference 1.0 and he was a gem.
If you find you're doing any web scraping look into the obscure spaceship operator. It makes parsing a small piece of larger text so much easier if you have good stop and start points.
Cheers on your journey! Not too many proud perl hackers out there but I made a good chunk of coin off that language and it was my first 'real' language so it has a dear place in my heart!