All of the criticism is well deserved. I must overcome my laziness and do as much as I can for myself. Thank you monks for the corrections. I truly wish I had a teacher to ask questions from, but I really am trying to learn Perl on my own. This is not a school assignment.

I myself am just learning Perl, and have just recently finished (my first reading of) the Llama. I've started now on the Alpaca (Intermediate Perl) and find the material interesting.

My best suggestion for you if you are having difficulty learning Perl is to work through the exercises at the end of each chapter in the Llama. The project that prompted me to learn Perl covers some more advanced ideas, so I had to go out and look at complex data structures while still reading the Llama. But the further I got through the book, the more I found that would help with my project, and that I would never have thought of. This site can be a boon to the Perl initiate, but you have to be willing to do the work.

So yes, you must overcome your laziness. Programmers are a lazy bunch, but (usually) only in the sense that they don't feel the need to re-invent the wheel over and over. Code reuse is one result of this laziness.

Those are just some of my thoughts.