Your third option sounds very interesting. I will say that I'm quite good at teaching myself the solutions to most problems in due time. But as I said, it's always finding something to do to promote my learning process that's the problem. After all, how do you know that space travel is possible if you're not even aware that space exists? Same goes for Perl...how do I know I can do that if I don't even know that "that" is possible with Perl.

Of course, having such a model would be very interesting. But I will admit it depends on what the goals of each small project might be. I'll be honest, there are things that wouldn't interest me enough to keep me coding. I'm not a programmer by nature. But I'm interested in many things. I might find some of your mini projects very exciting. Others might not peak my interests very much.

As for improving projects...I'm playing around a bit with a lot of projects right now. Unfortunately, they either have code that's beyond my level (and I can't understand enough to improve upon it), or they aren't well documented. Such is the life of Open Source, eh?

Thanks for your thoughts.

--Coplan