in reply to Would Perl be a good choice for converting MS Access files to PDF

I started with Perl about 2 years ago. My previous experience was with BASIC & Pascal but I hadn't done any serious programming for about 8 years.

I needed to sign-on to an e-mail account, download the e-mails, extract the attachments and then convert the attachments into a flat file format to go up into our production system.

In my case all I needed was:

  • O'Reilly Learning Perl Book
  • O'Reilly Programming Perl Book
  • The CPAN library
  • The key is before coding look at what CPAN can give you. It saved me days of coding.

    As for Perl, I found it very straightforward.

    Basically: Don't try and re-invent the wheel. Look at CPAN!!

    Best of Luck