Some people (I for one) like to learn how things work instead of using a module to do the work for them (Others I can't vouch for :P). I'm currently writing an IRC bot in perl and I *could* have used Net::IRC but I wanted to be able to write my own code and my own functions and frankly, I just wanted to learn how IRC worked on a client to server basis (After reading rfc2812). Not saying using modules is bad, but some people might like to learn how stuff works before having a module do it for them. -stormgard