Re: PERL newbie Cant figure out where to start

[Hue-Bond]

I am learning PERL little by little.

First, there's no such "PERL" thingy. Talk about either the programming language Perl or the interpreter perl.

I get bored, so I decided to start with a task and try and work backwards.

Nice approach. People learn things by doing them, not by reading lot of books on the subject.

You'll like to know that there is plenty of documentation in your own hard drive, waiting for you to read it. You can begin by reading perldoc perl, that is a kind of index of all the other documents. Then, continue by glancing at perldoc perlintro, perldoc perlsyn, perldoc perlop and perldoc perlfunc. Of course, you can come here to ask any questions when you don't understand something. After that, you should have an overview of the language and maybe you'll want to try and experiment some things. That's a good thing. Unfortunately I cannot tell you how to run perldoc on your machine since I've never installed any perl in any Windows.

Besides this, you also should know about CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. It's a huge collection of so-called modules that you can install on your machine and use for whatever you want. There are modules for everything: email, FTP, encryption, compression, HTML, openGL... more often than not, when you want to do something, you'll find that there's some module that implements it for you, so that you just install it, read its doc and enjoy it.

[ww]

C:\ perldoc perldoc for reading about perldoc, and
C:\ perldoc -f <topic>