Being the non-programming slacker that I am, I like Perl for writing *real* code because I can always find examples of code elsewhere to borrow from and I like shell for quick wrappers where I can leverage awk, sed, etc. I have taken numerous C classes which didn't help much because I wasn't real motivated..  I'm sick of programming "Hello World!" ;-)

Hey g00d_4sh,

If you have time over the next few days I would highly recommend trying the challenge. I had a lot of fun with it and learned as well. The only problem i had was obsessing over the things i didn't understand until I figured them out... who needs sleep anyway 

Oh, and good luck with the CCNA! I'd be curious to see how that goes for you.

~icetek

Sedated is right, I have been using Vista on one of my laptops for a while now and have had serious compatibility issues. Cisco VPN never worked properly and a number of other programs that I like just don't work. I find that I've had program crashes more than I ever did than XP. I'm guessing that in the service packs they should (hopefully) improve compatibility and stability. Good luck in your purchasing decision!

~icetek