To extend the analogy, perlmonks is like the staff at Home Depot. You can read the little "how-to" pamphlet, or the instruction manual for the cool new whiz-bang tool ( the man pages and perldocs), but sometimes you need a real person showing you how it is done, or pointing you to which of the various tools is best for your purpose. They know because they have seen it before, so you get the benefit of their experience.

By the way, the secret to foolproof copper soldering, is always sand the copper surfaces, before applying the acid flux. Now most manuals will say "make sure the copper is clean", but it takes an experienced plumber to say sand them. Just like here on perlmonks, there are certains usages that only come from the accumulated experience of the monks, which isn't in the docs.

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

In reply to Re^3: Always be learning - how a leaky pipe made me appreciate Open Source by zentara
in thread Always be learning - how a leaky pipe made me appreciate Open Source by talexb

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.