It has always seemed like it would be great to know how to program, but as a kid the "learn Basic" articles in magazines didn't work, and there were never programming classes, and then in college the programming classes were for EE/CS majors who already knew stuff. HTML, I learned from one intro and then the web, but for actual programming languages I couldn't figure out what was up... There are a ton, and apparently many are complex and terrible, and some are irrelevant to modern times?

It sounds like from this that once I ground through a "learn Perl" book I might be able to figure out what was going on by helping with DW?

It is somewhat encouraging-sounding.