Thank you both (jdtoronto and BrowserUK).

I'd like to look into everything but there is so much to learn and I'm kind of all over the place. I've read about 1/3 of Programming Perl, the first 3 chapters of Mastering Regular Expressions, I've got the Perl Pocket Reference which I use all the time and I've looked at a handful of examples in the Perl Cookbook. I do very, very little Perl programming at work. I wrote a few programs and that's it. I do mainly C++ and SQL professionally. I am very interested in Perl and would like to learn a lot more about it. That's where I am.

I've been thinking about picking up the Perl/Tk book to add to my collection of unfinished books. The idea of the GUI being portable across many platforms is great and I imagine this is where most of the GUI development will go.

I do use Windows exclusively and have been for years. There are things in the Windows GUI that are Windows specific like the System Tray. There are also non GUI Windows specific things like Services that would be neat to exploit using Perl.

So what I'd really like right now is to learn about all (or as much as possible) Windows stuff I can do using Perl. That is, I don't want to write my own libs or dlls in another language like C++. I want to use what is built into Perl or packages that have extended the language. That being said, I don't want to learn ALL packages because they are infinite (in theory). I want to lean the ones that have become "somewhat standard" by the Perl community. On that note, when I go to CPAN, how do I even know which packages are "somewhat standard".

Thank you for your time and patience.