The text book we are using for this course is CGI/Perl by Diane Zar....It is a Course Technology book by Thomson Learning. This was an exercise in Chapter 11 on cookies and it was the last exercise in the chapter (6). Our instructor could not explain why the order works and he thought like we did, that it should be put in a logical step of creating the cookie, adding to the cookie, sending the cookie to the browser and retrieving the cookie. If we move the lines of script around into the order I just said, then the script will only show the last item clicked and not any previous items if there had been any others clicked before the browser was closed. The script that does work was from his answer sheet with the order that did not make sense to us or him, but it worked. We are just wanted to know how can it create a cookie long before the statement to do it is done? I know this is not a pratical application in real life, but just an assignment to teach us how to create a cookie and to add to it....