I guess it depends on your mental makeup - personally I learn by doing rather than reading, and a language like perl makes that really easy (write a little snippet that attempts to perform a specific task starting with something simple and making it progressively more complex).

In some cases you need to read/understand quite a bit of stuff before you can start - if the basic concepts of what you are trying to do aren't understood then you obviously can't get from A to B, and that's where getting a clear explanation from someone who has already done something similar (or who understands the problem better) makes a lot of sense. But I think this should really be a bootstrapping process, rather than providing the complete solution.

Michael