If you are purchasing "Programming Perl" (which I feel would be a wise choice once you have devoured "Learning Perl") you will find a marvelous section in the back of the book which catalogs many of the incomprehensible errors that you can receive.

Perl is, pretty much, designed to be fed a whole program and it will then attempt to interperet it. I remember the first Perl program that I wrote on my own. I typed and consulted references until I was sure that I had written a nice little command line based mailer that did only what I wanted. I ran the program and did not receive any useful error. Rather, I saw something along the lines of "You fool! You managed to core dump perl!"

Needless to say, I was astonished. But I have learned through trial and error, over the past two years, a bit more about coding. I cannot agree with my fellow monks enough: code in snippets.

A great thing I figured out is this: If you can contain some code in a subroutine (which you'll find out about soon enough) you can run it as a separate program. By breaking your code down into the smallest logical components you can think of, you can test them as small programs and then bring them back into the whole. This will let you test the functionality of each piece and you can learn where to look for errors.

Best of luck to you, and don't get disheartened by the learning curve. We've all gone through it, and are all willing to help as much as we can.

Your posts will appear lost unless you are looking the "Newest Nodes" section. Sometimes they might not appear for a while, depending on how long you have caching set for. But that's just a good guess on my part.

If you make something idiot-proof, eventually someone will make a better idiot.
I am that better idiot.