I totally agree on all points above, running Perl on Windows would be better even than running ASP on Windows in my opinion ;-)

I learned Perl & CGI back in about 94 or 95... A good friend, who was an Engineer at Boeing, raved about it. See, they had a great deal of technical data which had to be formated into reports quarterly for the management. They spent almost as much time on the reports as they did generating the data... His team learned Perl so they could automate the report generation based on template designs and then they could focus on the Engineering... It was a huge success, they got perfect, upto the minute reports anytime they wanted...

Then 1/2 of them got fired because they could now do twice the work as before.... no just kidding there... ;-)

Anyway, When I learned CGI, it was ALL about Perl..... Java, JSP, etc. were not even blips on the screen... I found Perl a good way to start, but I quickly ran into Perls problems back then. It was designed for "text manipulation" not application development... so generating reports, reading and writing files, etc. was so easy it was great, but trying to automate matmatical calculations or manipulate data in an Excel document... forget it....

I tried to use C/C++ for the CGI, but I found hundereds of people out there asking "how" C/C++ could be used for CGI, and no one answering.... I eventually figured it out myself and selfishly guarded the knowledge... I wish, now, I had been more open with it... I built C/C++ CGI applications, very powerful but not easy for most people to handle...

Then I started using Java/JSP to do the same things... but back then, Java/JSP were young and slow...

Another friend said "PHP", I said what is that... he said it stands for "PHP Hypertext Protocol"... I said but then what is the PHP in that title mean.... and so on.... my first experience with "recusive names"....

I bought a book on PHP and began using it... then PHP got better and then better again... it still has a way to go before it is quality enough to be used for the type of projects I do mostly, but it is GREAT for most beginners to use for learning CGI... it makes it all quite easy...

AND, most ISP and Web Hosting that I am aware of will alllow PHP to be used for your site at no extra charge....

So, since there are few generic CGI references available that will be of use to a beginner, I recommend checking out Perl and PHP references, they will get you a long, long way ;-)

Or you can communicate with me directly, tell me what language you use, would like to use, and what your server will support and I can help you get started off line ;-)

Peace,