I consider myself a perl initiate, but no where near master. I got started late in the computer world. Sure I wrote BASIC on my Commodore 64 when I was eight years old, but after that, I was computer free until late high school. Who know what illegal activities I avoided being involved in? A BASIC programming class my junior year and a Turbo Pascal programming class my senior year (still high school) reignited my interest. I was still a total newbie. It wasn't until I graduated and made it into the workplace that I discovered something more powerful than batch files: perl. I touched vbs‎crip‎t and python, but always come back to the simplicity and the there's-more-than-one-way-to-do-it philosophy of perl.