Hello all. I am still very new to perl, slowly working my way through learning/programming perl which i find are two great books.

But I'm finding it hard to get off the ground with things to code, I have made a few simple apps like calulators and nslookup tools. So I picked up a CGI book as I run a server and thought it would be a good place to start coding something practical.

My question is I made this to start out with and what I don't understand why if all the counter code(within comments) is placed at the bottom the whole page wont display?

 #!/usr/bin/perl -w

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

$code = "index.html";
$counter = "counter.txt";

# countercode 
open(COUNTER, "< $counter") or die "$_";
$hits = <COUNTER>;
close(COUNTER);
# countercode

open(PAGE, "< $code") or die "$_";
while(<PAGE>) {
    chomp($_);
    print "$_\n";
}
close(PAGE);

print "<CENTER>Hits: $hits</CENTER>";
print "<CENTER>Process ID: $$ Time: $^T</CENTER><BR>";
print "</HTML>";

#countercode
open(COUNTER, "> $counter") or die "$_";
$hits++;
print COUNTER "$hits";
close(COUNTER);
#countercode
[download]

So I broke it up and It all comes out fine... also this seems very long winded, if anyone has any comments I would very much like to hear them. Also if anyone has any ideas for good apps/projects to get started with.

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