I'm 14, so obviously I've heard a lot of the "when I was your age" speeches. And...

You are definitely not full of crap..

As JAYPM (Just Another Young Perl Monk), I feel both honored and privileged to be a part of the PerlMonks community. With the help of PerlMonks, I am learning more and more about perl each day, and every helpful node I see, puts me at an advantage.
PerlMonks has been the foundation of my learning, since day 1; And I have never been to a more friendly and open enviroment dealing with programming.

I have been using UNIX for several months (although unrelated), and have been coding (or, fooling around with programming) since I was 11; I have experience with Logo, BASIC, JAVA, and now I'm learning Perl. And, from experience I can say that of all the references, and CS courses, nothing has been as helpful as PerlMonks.

PerlMonks covers everything for serious and newbie perl scripters..

Seekers of Perl Wisdom: post a snippet, get a fix

Categorized Questions and Answers: for a more broad question, ask away in a less chaotic part of the monastery

Library: for detailed help on a specific element or idea

Tutorials: having trouble (or no idea) how to complete a task? check this out

Snippets Section: for small bits of sample code

Code Catacombs: A very useful section for both sample code, and finding solutions others have wrote to problems of your own.

These sections, in my mind, hold the answers to Perl enlightenment.

die "Unexpected end of rant: Line 1000000";