I shall officially look to Python for all my scripting needs from now on. Just when I thought scripting could not get any easier than Perl, Python has come along and proved me wrong. Everything I have heard about Python's simplicity and elegance is true. My Python education started a while back when I attended at least two tutorials in grad school by Python enthusiasts who were trying to pull some of us Perl enthusiasts to their side. The whole idea of learning a whole new scripting language did not appeal to me and thus I didn't give Python much thought. Lately I have had some downtime and there seemed to be no more productive way to spend it than learning Python and that's what I did. My first set of tutorial was a quick and basic intro by Steven Thurlow . Aside from what is contained in those s ets of lectures, I needed to learn two sets of subjects, namely string/text manipulation and system calls. David Mertz provides a nice introduction to text processing usi...