I think in a way most of us are more or less guessing at the code we're writing, until we actually test it. But as a beginner who's only recently started to "speak" Perl, I usually trying to find a way to do what I want, and then look it up in a book to find out the exact syntax, usage, etc. That of course means that whenever I'm coding I have at least two books, and often enough the Perl CD Bookshelf, lying around - or falling to the floor, for that matter.

After some time, the things I have to do again all the time, and of course the basic stuff, just flow freely, but as soon as I want to do something new, I go and look it up - trying to keep it in mind for the next time, of course. And often the most useful resource, is PerlMonks. Although the books tell me how to do things, here I find more specific examples and sometimes even the exact solution I need to my problem, because someone has had it before, posted it in the Seekers of Perl Wisdom and got a helpful answer.

Something else that I find helpful, and in fact do all the time, is going back to my "old" code and see whether I've had the problem somewhere before, and if possible, just copy the code and adapt it.

But then, looking things up doesn't mean the code then actually works. Sometimes I have a problem which I think I know in what direction the solution has to go, and look that up. But then I realise that in fact, while this particular solution would work for another problem, I didn't assess the problem correctly and hence chose the wrong solution. Erm... Am I making sense here?

Anyway, I think looking things up doesn't hurt my pride. Point one, I am a beginner, after all, and point two, even if I weren't, there's always something that I haven't done before and hence haven't got a clue about. Just like you cannot speak a language perfectly, because a) you always make mistakes even in your first language, or neologise, or b) you may speak a dialect, or c), and this is the point, you don't know any kind of jargon which is not from your own field of work. Similarly, if I'd be working on a linux machine, I wouldn't have a clue, and wouldn't concern myself with, any Win32-stuff. (I wish...) Even if you know Perl, you don't know all of it.

--cs