I also use Cakewalk 9 as it seems to be the most useful for basic
MIDI editing.  Later they concentrated on audio and removed a lot
of useful features and made the program to complicated to use.
You can find original and also third party books about Cakewalk 9
in used book stores and on-line.

I never learned CAL because it is only useful for Cakewalk.  This
is what prompted me to learn to write MIDI manipulating programs
in Perl.  I can do anything with Perl that can be done with CAL scripts
and a whole lot more.  For example I wrote a program that re-maps notes
from to any other note/channel.  This can be used to change scales.

Perl can do a lot that CAL can not do such as modifying, adding or
removing messages based on all sorts of contextual analysis.  For
example I can add progressive pedaling to fit into the space between
on/off pedal events.  This sort of complex processing is impossible
using CAL alone.

Spencer Chase
Garberville, California
http://www.spencerserolls.com/