Small community? That's a perception issue, and it's unfair (though understandable).

Perl's installed almost everywhere, used almost everywhere, and has the biggest repository of free and freely redistributable libraries known to mankind in the CPAN.

Language hipsters who've flocked from Ruby to Erlang to Clojure to Node.js may not yak about it as much as they do their new shiny, but don't confuse that for widespread use.

Thanks. I'll try out Perl.

If you have a little bit of existing programming experience, my book Modern Perl may be of interest to you. Electronic versions are free and freely redistributable:

http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl/

This seems like just a reference, a lot doesn't make sense to me.