>>403
To get the only thing >>405 didn't cover, Perl's far from useless, a ton of stuff was and still is written in it. But in the past fifteen years or so it's lost a lot of popularity to other languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby. This is partially just a matter of fashion, partially some legitimate grievances with Perl (the big one being that Perl is perceived as extremely syntax heavy--that is, where Perl has a special form/operator to do something, many other languages would have a function in the standard library).
After you've learned one programming languages, others are generally pretty easy. Happy hacking!