Also being new to Perl I'd like to ask what people mean when they say dbmopen is deprecated? I'd always taken the term deprecated to mean "don't use this feature anymore because there are other ways of doing it and it may not appear in subsequent versions"

However, in the Llama book merlyn (who's input to this question would be greatly appreciated if at all possible :)) and Tom Phoenix specifically use language that says (amongst other things);

"other documentation .. claims that dbmopen is deprecated"

Does this mean dbmopen isn't really deprecated, or is nobody really sure? Is there some place where there is a list of language features that are deprecated? In the spirit of TMTOWTDI should we still be able to use dbmopen when just tieing to hashes? (Especially as the Llama book teaches that as a simple way to do it... and remembering that Perl lets us make the easy things easy?)

Thanks for your time and patience,
Neil