You're a child; I'm 52. 8-) And have been programming for *sigh* 35 years.

Most of my work is in PL/1 on a piece of Big Iron, though I've worked on a few C++ / Unix projects and a lot of Perl / Unix projects over the last four years. Upgrading the skill set is, in a word, frustrating. The alternative is petrification, stagnation and death.

I've found that the debugger is my friend, as are a lot of old-fasioned print statements. I had the same problem with the Alpaca book that you did. Sometimes writing an even smaller program (focusing on the point of confusion) helps.

Best of all, though, are the Perl Monks. This site and the community here are absolutely incredible. As long as you've done your Due Diligence, someone here will be willing and able to help.

Keep smiling, keep programming. Programming is life!

In reply to Re: Enlightenment and Frustration by apl
in thread Enlightenment and Frustration by chexmix

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.