You shouldn't feel too bad - my company sent me to Perl training and my instructor (okay, he was a sub) couldn't give me a good definition of regular expressions! I think the reason why you see so many different types of discussions here is that many of us probably work as developers in other languages and are just learning Perl. From the way things seem to be heading though, learning XML probably wouldn't be a complete waste of your time. The only book I can recommend on XML is the little O'Reilly XML Pocket Reference, but there's a great web site at http://www.w3schools.com/ where you can learn all kinds of web skills for free including XML (and XSL and SOAP...) and they even give book reviews at the site. (Nothing on Perl, unfortunately.) But regarding books on Perl, if you don't mind your books on CD, The Perl CD Bookshelf from O'Reilly is the best value I've found. You get the complete text of 6 O'Reilly Perl books on a single CD for $59.95 (US): Learning Perl, Programming Perl, Perl in a Nutshell, Perl Cookbook, Advanced Perl Programming, and Learning Perl on Win32 Systems. You even get the print copy of Perl in a Nutshell which seems to be a pretty good desk reference. The downside is that you have to be at your computer to read them and my copy still has the 2nd edition of both Learning Perl & Programming Perl. But the really nice thing about it is that it's formatted in HTML and you can search ALL 6 BOOKS in a single shot and take your pick of what you want to read. Bob -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2001 5:32 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: This is odd to me I read Learn Perl in 24 Hours. I did the exercises in the book, and I wrote a couple web pages where you could submit a text file that would be posted onto the web (i.e. joke of the day sites). I've written scripts that have taken files of lists of labels, compared them, then built a list of the ones that were in one an not the other file. I thought that qualified me as a beginner. Then I join this group, and I get discussions of regexes and XML, etc. I have no idea what a regex is! What books have you guys (who I assume are beginners too, since that's the name of this board) been reading? Turn me into a beginner too! Kirk