is so anti-Perl, I kinda hesitate to learn it

Well, I'm coming from perl and I feel fine with coding in ruby. And it's not really andit-Perl, they took a good load of the good perl stuff :)

once the american o'reilly comes up with a good book to read...

I took "Programming Ruby" by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt (which is from Addison Wesley) and it gave me a very good start. The only problem I got is the small code base to look at...

Regards...	Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion