1.9 What You Don't Know Won't Hurt You (Much)

Finally, allow us to return once more to the concept of Perl as a natural language. Speakers of a natural language are allowed to have differing skill levels, to speak different subsets of the language, to learn as they go, and generally, to put the language to good use before they know the whole language. You don't know all of Perl yet, just as you don't know all of English. But that's Officially Okay in Perl culture. You can work with Perl usefully, even though we haven't even told you how to write your own subroutines yet. We've scarcely begun to explain how to view Perl as a system management language, or a rapid prototyping language, or a networking language, or an object-oriented language. We could write chapters about some of these things. (Come to think of it, we already did.)

But in the end, you must create your own view of Perl. It's your privilege as an artist to inflict the pain of creativity on yourself. We can teach you how we paint, but we can't teach you how you paint. There's More Than One Way To Do It.

Have the appropriate amount of fun.