You're right; this is something that has been discussed many times before.

You are aware that there are ways to find these nodes already, aren't you? You can:

• Start by looking at Best Nodes, which lists the top nodes in the Monastery.

• Go to a given monk's home node and sort their write-ups by Highest Reputation first.

• Browse home nodes for nodes recommended by monks who's opinions you respect.

• Check out the Most Visited Nodes. Or, simply bounce around.</P

• And so on. Poke about in the corners, fiddle with the Snippets, etc.

Sure, it requires a little bit of work on your part, but isn't that what learning to master Perl--or programming in general--generally requires? Sure, someone could hand you the best nodes on a platter, but it's up to you to determine how to use that information to your advantage. All the best technique in the world won't help you improve unless you learn how to incorporate those ideas into your own work.

Also, keep in mind that highly reputed nodes aren't necessarily the most useful ones. Yes, we have some highly rated nodes containing wonderfully technical wisdom, however, we also have OT nodes with high reputations (including some of mine).

Reputation is a darkly-reflected idea of how the community at large liked a node at the time. It's not a measure of its accuracy, utility, or usefulness in any real-world situation. In fact, some of the most useful nodes have reasonably low reputations. I believe it's better to make your own decisions regarding a node's excellence. Vote that opinion, certainly, but take Reputation with a grain of salt. Finally, remember that some nodes have low reputations not because they were inaccurate, but because they were unpopular or controversial. Again, only you can judge a node's true worth.

As someone has pointed out repeatedly, 1_000_000 XP and $1.79 will buy you a cup of coffee.

It may be more fruitful to pick an area you wish you knew more about and then look for threads covering that area. I think you'll find as many gems buried at the bottom of threads as you will perusing any given monk's most well received works.

--f

Another place to look is on people homenodes. Many of the monks include lists of worthy posts, some of which are really good. I tend to routinely look at monks homenodes and have found them to be a mine of excellent information, if perhaps a little hard to search and unorganized.

Update
I heartily recommend Turnsteps home node. Kick ass!

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)

The other obvious thing to point out is that plenty of gems will still be missed, because there are plenty of times that the good stuff is overlooked by the masses. The only real way to find the good stuff on a given topic is to look for it, ie, ask in the chatterbox or super search.

Just my US$0.02
Scott

It would be useful when searching to be able to sort results based on nodes' ratings, even if the ratings are not actually visible in the results.

A high reputation is no guarantee that a given node is going to provide a better answer to one's question, but the rep is usually a good inidicator of the value of the information included.

conv