How can he learn Perl without slinging some code? I've found, for myself, that I just cannot grab a book or whatever and "absorb" a language from scratch. I have to have some concrete problem to solve, and I learn the language as I go about solving it. Now, that means of course that if I don't need CGI in my solution that I'm not going to learn CGI, but that's what works best for me. After I have a fairly strong foundation in the language, then I can start branching out to learn things I'm not actually needing to use right away.