Hi,

What I really like about Perl, as a relative newbie, is that whatever point you are at on the learning curve you can get satisfactory results quickly. If you want to use Perl for simple scripts to do simple jobs you can do and you get quickly get to feel that you can tackle more difficult tasks. You find that the thing that you did in longhand has a shortcut and you add that to your repertoir of skills. Its like picking up a musical instrument that somehow you can just play tunes on without much training. This makes you feel good so you want to learn how to play other more complicated tunes.

The one gripe I have (sorry but I do use Perl for CGIs) is with shared servers. The module that I really want to use is nearly always the one that admin decided not to install. I feel guilty on a $50 a year server asking them to install a module just for me.

Best wishes

Sid