One of the best ways to learn a programming language is to practice. People new to Perl can either make up a new project for themselves or can get involved in an existing open source project. So which projects would you recommend for newbies? How can they get involved? I heard a lot about the DreamWidth development community to be very beginner friendly so I joined them to learn how are they doing it. So far I cannot really recommend that for newbies. While the people are really very friendly the code base they inherited from LiveJournal has all the marks of the last 12 years on it. I don't think this is something I'd want newbies to see. Maybe in a few months it can be cleaned up. Padre, the Perl IDE. I would love to see newbies get involved in the development of either core Padre or some of the plugins. Thanks to some of the other developers in the project the code is relatively well organized though there are lots of places for improvement. People are friendly in the project but I think our project does not yet have real facilities to help newbies. Also the documentation of wxPerl is very lacking, another thing that makes it difficult for newbies to get started. I just asked on our mailing list how to improve the situation so I hope we will make our project more accessible for beginner contributors. Also we'll follow up on the ideas listed in Improving the Padre experience. What projects could you recommend for newbies? How can we make more projects accessible to newbies?