I'm somewhat baffled by the lack of mention of Perlmonks in the article. One of the thing I've harped at my kids since they we're young was that school was the only place where people will give you there knowledge for free. I should revise that to include Perlmonks, but because it is so unique, it's kind of hard to fit the exception into the phrase smoothly.

I've prided myself on being self taught, till I came to Perlmonks and realize how much I was missing. While I may have been able to get things to work when the others around me couldn't, I had no clue how many bad habits I had or what elegance in code truely was. I had laziness, impatience and hubris, but for all the wrong reasons and expressed in my code in all the wrong ways.

Since coming here, Perl via Perlmonks has proven to be my Rosetta Stone into other languages. A beginner that can't cope with (kindly worded) RTFM, does not truely even qualify as a beginner. A mentor that doesn't slap the apprentice upside the head isn't mentoring. Adjusting the ego is a big key in establishing where you are going with your language development skills.

If Perlmonks isn't one of the best places for a beginner with real world coding aspirations than such a place will never exist. I can only guess that the lack of mention of Perlmonks exposes some sort of political schiszm within the Perl elite. The resource that Perlmonks represents should stand next to CPAN as one of the shinning jewels of not only Perl but Open Source as well.