Over the last couple of days, I pulled down some of my books on programming languages and set out to begin some learning. For a while I have wanted to get myself to a place where I have a full grasp of at least one general purpose programming language as well as a shell programming language. Those languages that I aspire to understand had been determined years ago and have not changed since: Perl and Bash. Bash is an easy choice because I have been using the Bash shell on Linux and Macintosh for years. As for Perl, I have been drawn to it because of its regular expressions capabilities and flexibility. In fact, I bought books on Perl and as well as another on Linux that covered shell programming in detail some years ago, but I never spent enough time on any of them that I learned all of the basics of either language.