The scariest part is Reading The Wrong Manual. Unfortunately there are a lot of bad Perl books out there - most of them quick throwaway CGI focused (if you can actually call them focused) scraps of paper waste that deserve not the effort to put an ISBN number on them.

I accidently wandered into using perl after a few years of being a cold fusion/java on Macintosh programmer - hosting on an NT server I could barely maintain. I was forced to learn perl because clients keep wanting to put scripts from an unmentionable script archive on my server.

Talk about culture shock!

It was like bumbling through the dark and falling off the pier. Picking up a ton of rotten books on perl was like hitting the rocks below and missing the water entirely.

A kind soul gave me learning perl.

Since then I have pretty much stuck to the oreilly books, even went as far as to purchase and run the oreilly webserver on my NT box ( cannot say enough nice things about oreilly - the two thick books for their webserver are overly complete and would be excellent reading for anyone working on the net - even if they *don't* run that webserver).

That said, I still have problems reading through the perldocs - they are written from a perspective I only partially gained relatively recently. Personally I think the most frustrating bits of documentation are sprintf and printf. They basically say - they work like sprintf(3) and printf(3) or some such verbage. I still mess them up constantly. I'm sure many of the monks here chuckle at that and I will someday myself, but it was frustrating trying to learn perl without access to a command line.

So now I am reading the right manuals...I just cannot find the preface and forword so I can understand them properly.

Thanks,

EEjack