Brother,
Your advice is well taken .
Though my son is brilliant programmer in c and c++ and damn good in embedding and his perl knowledge is limited because of speed issue .
I am also a engineer involved with town planning and developing certain new cities but programming when challenged by my son though in a very polite mode was too tough.
Six months back I tried c and when I reached pointers I crashed my computer three times and then one of my friend advised to learn perl and after studying about 5 books in perl I challenged my son that can you start perl in interactive mode in windows and he could not reply and i have done in a single linar