Learning Perl

I'm finally learning the Perl language.  Being a Microsoft guy for so long, I really stuck with C/C++/C#, VB, VB.NET and VBScript.  I even wrote client-side scripting in JScript and not JavaScript. :-)

This will be my second new language in the past four months.  Previously, for my last project, I was doing some basic, and intermediate T-SQL scripting against a large database.  While quirky, T-SQL is a complete programming.

In that project, all the product build scripts were written in Perl, which I found pretty hard to read.  Of course, commenting was non-existant, and many of the scripts were wrapped in Windows Script Files (.wsf), which used VBScript or JScript to launch the Perl scripts.  It was maddening.

Now, I'm going to be expected to write server-side Perl scripts for back-end functionality of web-based directory services applications.  I picked up the O'Reilly book, Programming Perl, which seems very complete.  It's been a long time since I started reading a computer book at Chapter 1, but so far, so good.

I've been able to avoid non-Microsoft languages for awhile, because frankly, I've been able to do everything I've needed to without them.  But with Perl, I'm beginning to think that it's going to be the best tool for the job.  I'll post more on this later.  Comments welcome, particularly on using Visual Studio to edit Perl files.