in reply to Always be learning - how a leaky pipe made me appreciate Open Source

I could relate to your analogy, I've replaced an entire house's plumbing through Home Depot. It's interesting to just wander through the aisles and look at "what's available to do a certain job".... there is always something new.....just like CPAN. (I went with copper :-) ).

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
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Re^2: Always be learning - how a leaky pipe made me appreciate Open Source
by talexb (Chancellor) on Feb 07, 2006 at 13:14 UTC
      It's interesting to just wander through the aisles and look at "what's available to do a certain job"

    And that's what trolling through the man page and/or documentation is like .. instead of asking 'How can I do X?', why not ask 'What functions and features are available?' and go with that.

    Alex / talexb / Toronto

    "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

      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
        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.

        With what grade sandpaper? Are we talking 220 or 80? It makes a difference! :-)