Hi chexmix,

I understand your frustration. I sometimes feel the same when I do not fully understand the topic at hand. I will give you my 2 cents advice hoping that it will help you.

First, you need to find something practical that you want to accomplish. In other words, you need to find purpose. It could be that you want to develop a game (such as Racing Mice with Language::Logo - MouseRace.pm) or you want to track stocks (as in Get US stock tables from WSJ) , or you want to write a cool obfuscation (like the one in Genetic Code). Whatever it is you want to do with Perl, it is a good idea to have a purpose in mind. Having a purpose will simplify things because you can focus on what you need to learn to accomplish your goal. This will keep you motivated and will help you find immediate use for what you are learning.

Once you achieve your initial goal, you might want to expand your horizon adding new goals and learning new things that will help you accomplish those goals.

Finally, I encourage you to have a look at the following nodes for some useful ideas:

Cheers!

lin0

In reply to Re: Enlightenment and Frustration by lin0
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.