Thank you Sherm, Trey, David, Adam, Puneet, Kriss, Rich & Stephano for your input.
wow! I've already subscribed to a couple more lists that look helpful .. and fun! thanks Puneet. I was lucky to start learning Perl with O'Reilly Books, so I feel quite comfortable with the language itself as long as it was on MacPerl. Going Unix (Darwin) was something I had looked forward to, but quite scary at the same time: somehow I know how to fix my "Classic" Mac (Sherm) even if something goes really *wrong*, but feared that setting up the date & time in OSX without the GUI would take a NASA Scientist (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit, I'm actually quite exited playing around in the Terminal.app). I'd downloaded David's article on compiling Apache with mod_perl (*and* Kevin's Perl 5.8.0 as well) from pointers in this list and they've been sitting on my Desktop waiting for my courage ... I guess I'll take a look at expat first and see how I go. Most important: I took up programming during one of my country's (Ecuador) biggest crisis in 1999. I was lucky enough to have chosen Perl *randomly* out of a list of at-that-time-all-greek-to-me languages. I've literally fallen in love with it, sort of the way Bach would fall in love with mathematics. But no, there's no way I'm giving up music ... it might be tougher than most "jobs", but it's sound in you soul is part of your God given Salary. Luckily enough, thing are better now: for one thing Ecuador is in better shape and I'm doing well (http://www.riccardoperotti.com), and for another, I'm moving to Canada next year! I haven't actually made any money with Perl until a couple of months ago, but then again, Bach didn't make any money with Math either ... then again, I'm hardly Bach .... and then again, Bach didn't make any money with his music either ... and aren't we all glad he didn't become a Math teacher instead!!! Stefano: I'm afraid that although my Italian father tough me how to "defend myself" in Italian, I'm very poor at writing it. I'm not near Italy, as noted before, but wish you the best with perlmongers.it and thank you for the invitation! (too bad there's no www.perlmongers.ec) Thank you all again, really. I'm off to "perldoc-ing" (first things first, I guess). Riccardo -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.riccardoperotti.com