Dear Monks,

In my job, I have to do a lot of automation. Say for example, I need to send an update out to 1000 workstations overnight to install Adobe Acrobat (or remove Netscape, or install Office XP, the specific application is not important) but no one will be at the computer in the middle of the night, so I need to automate the entire process. In the past, I have been using "winbatch" but I would like to use Perl (if it can do this? It can do everything else, why not this?) but I am not familiar with what modules I would need to install (or how to install a module without a internet connection) or where I could turn for advice on a project like this.

I'm not asking for freebies here, the majority of my packages are "throw away code" (use it for once and when you are done, toss it) and very application specific so I am looking for a good documented source that will allow me to negotiate the Windows GUI (push buttons inside an application, choose an item from a drop down box, or even write text into a text box)

Is there a book that has this kind of information documented or a module I can look for and try to figure the rest out myself. I'm still learning Perl (at the baby steps level) and I can do some stuff, I've used modules but I don't understand them so the more documented it is, the better off I will be.

Thanks