This year's greatest harvest: the ability to script using Perl--which made my life much easier.
"You're the first person I know who worries about unicode in Perl before even beginning learning this language." << what a computer guy said when I was mentioning these topics to him--Right, before knowing what a "file handle" does, I cared about if Perl is able to deal with unicode. Anyway, to learn a language is not to show off, but to use it. To me, being aware of that Perl is good at text manipulation, of course I would pay special attention to unicode, as I know how the hell it is when opening non-unicode files from non-English encoded computers.
Instead of the Camel Book, which is probably most people would start with, my experience was introduced by "the tadpole book", followed by "the frog book". Then the Camel came to fill minor holes that are left by the first two. Thus I don't really know how good the camel is to a newbie. From my own memory, if you know no perl and know some basic biology, the tadpole and the frog can be your friends with proper and easy-to-understand examples. Proper, at least I'm clear I can do this or that in my own life using this language. Examples can decide if a textbook is helpful. Some books lacks practicability in terms of how they give examples. So that's how these two stood out. They do cover a wide range of Perl topics in detail. You don't need to worry about missing any important topic that is at or below the level of module and package. There was no too much new stuff from "Intermediate Perl", which came after the two. Of course, like I already said, these books are for bio-people, so not everyone can really benefit from them.
However, when I opened the last "Advanced Topics", I felt like everything there was none of my business--that's too specific to focus, and guess I will find solutions when I myself am facing those problems. (Probably that's why there is no "Advanced level" of the Japanese learning book series. The word "advanced" is just too abstract to be summarised into one single book.) Yet I indeed learned a little bit from "the advanced": HTML templates and utf8--and I was laughing that what I really cared about before learning the language is an advanced topic!
Besides pure text, I've also dabbled in CGI for my still-in-mind independent website. Although I didn't have enough time recently, I've come to fix/improve "our" website and now being much more confident in reading some not-so-complicated CGI codes. I used to consider php as well, but it seems I'm going to give up before the first touch. As what I know from others, almost everything you can do with php can be done by perl-CGI, but not vice versa. Another reason, try to repeat "php" for many times, aren't you getting stuttered?! With special naming fetish, I simply won't allow such a hard-to-pronounce name being the main scripting language for my own website!
Other than Perl, my next target is python (already started but being paused right now due to my opera-fever), merely because lots of people saying it's good and useful. I'd like to see what's going on with it, although I doubt I'll go too much. So far my bible is only Perl, and I don't want to be disrupted by stupid indentations.
Finally, my naming fetish contributed how I name my scripts: Method_XXX for modules/packages, and Exec_XXX for regular scripts. Thanks to Ar Tonelico! And it will be tomorrow's topic: A non-gamer's games.