Well, considering that I'm currently living the "Back Then" period, I've got some doosies fresh in hand :-) I've not had any formal edumacation(heh) in programming techniques. I'm all self taught(With many books), My first start was with GW on an old 286. I lost interest for the most part, eventually joined the military, became a *nix admin, left the military, began to write scripts to make my job easier. I got frustrated with the limitations of the various shell scripts, and began my search for a language. I really don't know the "exact" reason I chose Perl... Maybe it was that I've been told it was difficult, and I like a challange. I've been playing with Perl now for about 4 months, nothing I've done to this point really keeps me up at night. I found the monastery early in my studies (I think I got the link from the llama book? I don't remember for sure) and the kind monks here have kept me from forming too many bad habbits. My thanks to the monks who took the time to answer my "uneducated" questions :-) Even though it's not Perl, there are some bourne shell scripts that I still think about and shudder (Think lots of rsh calls and .rhosts, and the fact that I'm sure that they are still in use).

LR