The first contact with perl was from a student of Mediatechnik and Design who lived together with me (about 1996). He had to write some cgi-Scripts, but as good as he was in design, as bad he was in programming (I prefered C at that time). So he often asked me for advice, and sometimes I happened to help him, although I found perl terrible at that time (didn't know about strict and -w). About 1998, I had to learn perl for a holiday job to change some codes. Well, it worked somehow, although I used to program perl in C-Style. Within two months, I tried my best to improve my perl-Skills by reading the books Learning Perl and Programming Perl and even Advanced Perl, which was much to early at that time.

Later I got a project at a big german newspaper as a network administrator, but somehow I hardly managed any networks. I just wrote scripts to make management easier. There I got to know about Perl's beauty and rapid development, and started loving it.

The scripts got bigger and bigger, by and by I got to know CGI, Tk, Database programming, OOP, Client-Server-programming. I bought and read every book about Perl I could get, and at this time, Advanced Perl Programming was too late because I nearly knew everything what was written inside, so it wasn't interesting any more :-)

In 2000, I changed the project (where I still am) and develop a data synchronisation tool for a big german bank with data from several databases all over the world with a directory system, data exports, tools like parsing csv-Files and creating tcl-Configfiles for tools that set up directory schemes and the like.

Besides, I'm writing small scripts for other customers, e.g. an automatic bill-writing system based on excel with an interface to accounting (=bookkeeping?) software, a chat (see http://chat.fabiani.net/chat/) which will propably never finish, and some minor stuff.

Best regards,
perl -le "s==*F=e=>y~\*martinF~stronat~=>s~[^\w]~~g=>chop,print"