In term of languages Perl has a lot to offer for people who need to get the job done - besides the enormous power of the language itself you have CPAN and the community. CPAN is *the* best resource of free high quality library functions for any language IMHO. The modules on CPAN are as ecclectic as Perl itself and cover almost anything you can think of doing. Perlmonks is one of the best support forums for any language and you have others like comp.lang.perl.misc if you like newsgroups and don't mind the odd flame.

By trade I am a doctor of medicine but have been running an IT company and doing systems admin for quite a while now. Programming for 25 years now, and almost exclusively in Perl for the last 3.

As with anything the more you do the better you get. The beauty of Perl is that (with modules) you can get amazing results very early on, with the community there to help you with problems. BTW New Monks is probably worth a read (especially the bit about how to ask questions) as is the CGI Help Guide and A Guide to Installing Modules and Use strict, warnings and diagnostics or die

tachyon

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