If you like hard-copy, definitely go with the "camel" book, "Programming Perl", by "Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Randal L. Schwartz. It's published by O'Reilly and the ISBN is 1-56592-149-6. If you want a book that's a tutorial, go with "Learning Perl" by Randal L. Schwartz. But "Programming Perl" is still a must-have, IMO.
It's not only a very thorough reference (which I like -- what I typically want from hard-copy is just a list of functions and their syntax, since I can never remember which languages use substr, which use instr, and which want the searched-for string first or second in the parameters, for example), but it's also a wonderful read. After looking up only a few things in it, I was so entertained I decided to make it a bed-time read for a while. Problem with that was that I'd read something I wanted to check out, so I'd be out of bed and at the computer instead of sleeping. <g>
Personally, I've found XP to be pretty reliable. Even more so (IMO) than W2K and NT, which it's based on. I've had my personal machine for about 6 months and I don't think it's ever crashed. And it runs 24/7.
It wasn't "getting rid of DOS" that MSFT was gung-ho to do. It was making an OS that didn't run in DOS. Earlier versions of Windoze were really nothing more than pretty shells that ran in DOS. DOS still exists, but it runs from inside Windoze rather than vice-versa.
on the Win98 machine at the house, the DOS mode is crippled so I'm forced to boot from a floppy to do things the way I want to do them.
Hmmmm.... I used to occasionally need to run my Win9x machines in DOS mode, but most of the time I could just open a DOS box and they'd run fine.
However, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that a lot of DOS programs won't run in Windoze. Especially if they try to talk directly to the hardware.
I ran across this when I was running my BBS and I wrote a program to process credit card transactions online. To my knowledge, it was the first PC-based program certified by MAPP. The BBS ran a client version (a "door" in the parlance) that would gather the info then put it in a semaphore file which the server version (the one that did all the real work and was a process running on a separate machine) would open and process. Because of the importance of the CRC calculations and the precision required in communicating with MAPP's system, I had to write it very low-level, which meant I was grabbing data out of the modem's data stream and processing it a byte at a time. Not only did my program have to talk to and control the modem, it had to do it very specifically for the particular modem I was using, and run so fast that the buffer never overflowed. Perfect job for Assembler, but I did it in QuickBasic.
Anyway, a program like that simply won't run in Windoze. Not even in DOS mode. The machine has to be running pure DOS because in Windoze, you're not allowed to go behind the OS's back and talk to the hardware directly. Which is one of the things I hate about it, actually.
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