I am online here very often, but I am not the only one here, and there are others who will be at least as helpfull as I try to be. So please, simply post whatever questions you have regarding Perl and your project, but please keep those questions small in focus, otherwise the answers will be as broad as your questions.

Your project that you want to write is quite large for a first programming project, but it is not completely infeasible to do it. You already have taken one major step and broken down the program into successive stages. Now you slowly need to start working on these stages:

1. Install Perl, and get a very simple script working. Familiarize yourself with the code editor, how to run a Perl program, and the errors that Perl returns.
2. Write a Perl script and using the regular expressions, extract all text files from my hardisk that are in a particular format and have a certain arrangement of filenames.
3. Compare the files based on date and year and possibly place which are included in the file name itself. Once compared, sort them by date, and then location (if multiple files were made on the same date).
4. Eventually take the multiple files created on the same date to append with a header at each concatenation with just the "location" in the header to as to where was the file created.
5. Organize these files so that I can use Perl to input them directly into an MS Access DB. This would enable me to sort them and so an and so forth. I'll design the db after I am done with Step 2.
6. Build some animations and autoscripting utilities so that the DB will run as an intro program for anyone who may burn the program on a disk and run the disk.
7. Enable atleast some form of security on the program so that ONLY ONE PERSON who has the username and the password should be able to use the program.
8. Figure out a way so that I can keep a user who does not know the username and the password from running the program.

If you write the program to work for step 1 first, then you have a clear plan on what to add next. Perl has plentyfull of modules that will help you reading files, accessing a database and creating a fancy user interface, so you are not looking in the wrong direction when chosing Perl to solve your problem.

But every journey begins with a first step, and first, you have to install Perl and get a first small program working with Perl. In addition to the one-liners that I gave you in my above reply, you can type in the following program, save it as 99names.pl, and then start it via the command line, or maybe even via a double-click on the program, once Perl is installed properly:

#!perl -w
use strict;
my $username = '99names';
print "Hello $username! This is the first Perl program\n";
print "Press the Enter key to end this program.";
<>;
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