beginning programming

I have had a couple of web sites for a while now - I taught myself html and bought a WYSIWYG (does that remind anyone else of a toupŽe on a bicycle?)

For the past year or so I've been grappling with some perl scripting - adapting stuff I've had written to changing circumstances. I can recognise a lot of stuff within the scripts but there seems to be a barrier to actually compiling scripts.

I would very much like to do some scripting/programming for myself but don't seem to be able quite to grasp the fundamentals of what's going on. OK maybe I'm just thick, but if anyone has a beginners 'well that did it for me' resource (book, web site, whatever..) then I'd be interested to know about it.

This is one of the only perl/CGI tutorials I can recommend that I have seen on the web. Almost all other tutorials are written like perl hasn't progressed since 1997 and/or by the clueless with a little knowledge under thier belt.

I also recommend that you go to the www.perlmonks.org site, and look in the "Reviews" section- you will get honest, clueful answers to what books are worth dropping cash on, far better than what you find for reviews on Amazon.

I suggest you read the tutorial above, trying out the code. Code some, then by "Learning Perl" and "CGI Programming with Perl" by O'Reilly. Read, digest, and code. Then buy "Programming Perl" (aka the "Camel"), and "the Perl Cookbook" from O'Reilly again.

If you read, re-read and try stuff from these books, your perl-fu will be very strong.

After you've learned a little perl, try picking up some PHP. It's a very nice web scripting language. You could go the other direction too (PHP then perl). Just make sure to learn both, perl is an excellent general-purpose scripting language, while PHP is more specialized for the web.

There are other languages out there too, obviously- Python, java, etc. I say start with Perl and PHP first- that's enough to keep you busy, and productive, far into the future.

I appreciate your advice, and will follow it - thank you. I have visited Ovid's tutorial, I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into it!!