Excellent. I would like to take your math concept a bit further. The purpose of the classes in which you speak of taking were exactly stating my point. You can't eat the meat until you drink the milk first. You took algebra first which helped you to somewhat understand geometry, then you took trig which then of course made more sense because you took geometry and so and so forth. If Perl newbies always used modules to do everything without ever understanding how those modules work (because modules are simply perl code bundled up to make certain tasks easier) they may not ever learn how certain things could or should be coded. That's all I am trying to say.

The only time greater things come from great things is when people understand the basic foundation upon which those great things were built. Perl is no exception to this idea/rule which chromatic stated my intentions of this write-up perfectly in the first reply to this write-up.

This is all I was trying to point out. However, all of your points are very well put and valid. It is probably not too wise to take valuable time in learning why modules do what they do while you are on the line trying to get a production script out for work related purposes. See my reply to LD2 above.

As for re-inventing the wheel, well, the idea behind re-inventing the wheel making sense or not is, in my opinion, in the eye of the re-inventor. Whether the new (and improved?) wheel was worth the time and effort is something that perhaps only the person who ''re-invented'' it can answer until that person gives that code out to the world for scrutiny. I am positive that the CGI modules written have been massaged time and time again (thus perhaps certain blocks of code having been re-written/re-worked/re-invented) to make these hardened scripts just that...hardened.

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- Jim