I don't consider myself as a programmer and I probably never will. The reason why I got envolved with scripting language was because I worked as an application engineer for a software company that had a COMMAND interface in their application and that allowed interaction using initially Cshell and later Perl to communicate with it. So I had to learn Perl and without knowledge of any programming language I basically have been able now for one year to do anything I want with Perl, most of the things I learned, I have learned them from this site. I feel that I can do basically anything with Perl from powerfull user interfaces to Database communications, to comprehensive IO handlings but even I can all do this I still don't believe I talk the language of a programmer. Still many things on this site will be completely Chinese for me. However their is a trend switching that is pushing me to look at something else. Software I use is using Visual Basic language and using Visual Basic objects, ..... So I have convinced myself to have a look at it and I have purchased Visual Basic.net. The only thin I have done is installed it and that is it. Now I would like to know if :

1) I totally wasted my money because everything it can do Perl can do.

2) For a novice programmer who can do anything in Perl because of a strong supportive non-commercial organisation will be getting nowhere using commercial software that require dollar for every question needed.

3) With Perl knowledge and nothing else then Perl knowledge it is impossible to learn Visual Basic from the box.

Any other ideas or suggestions you have on this. Is the right thing to do. Everybody is talking so much about Visual Basic.net.

Does anybody knows on any good sites that can be called an equivalent of perlmonks for Visual Basic ?

Edit by tye, remove A tags