the thing I liked about perl, and what eventually made it possible for me to learn was that the documentation was simple, and I was able to hammer it into a usable form from within emacs, using (perlfunc) and (perlmod). so I tried doing that with language like java, and ran into trouble. that’s because so much of the java documentation is completely devoid of examples.
what I would often do is clip a snippet and modify it for my purposes. its a learning modality thing.