th3j4ckl3,

Welcome to Perl and PM. I have worked in AIX for about 24 years, and have used Perl for about the last 15 years.

Perl just gets better and better.

You ordered the right book, but you may also want to get the O'Reilly companion book "Perl Cookbook". I only found out about it on PM, and it has a lot of useful examples that are full scripts. You can get source for the scripts from the O'Reilly web site. It may help you appreciate the power of Perl!

One note of caution about AIX. IBM has sometimes shipped the development version of Perl, and not the stable version. Versions 5.8.8 and 5.12+ or newer are great versions of Perl. I have compiled them with both the gcc 4.2.4 and the xlc compilers without much problem. You can check your version:

  perl -v              # tells you just the version

  perl -V              # thats a capital V, and it tells how Perl was 
+compiled
[download]

This is covered in your book.

Enjoy!