"I've talked about Perl quite a lot in recent columns, largely because it's still an incredibly useful language for sys admins. On a seasonal Perl note, the Perl Advent Calendar has been going since 2000, and it provides a Useful Perl Module for every day between the 1st and the 24th of December. Less chocolatey than your average advent calendar, but possibly more useful.
"Some of the useful ones so far in this year's calendar:
"local::lib for managing local library installs. Best practice is not to install modules from CPAN as root; instead, you can use the system perl and keep your own CPAN directory under your home directory."
