I have gone through a different path, but I share your feeling. This site is very helpful.

My Perl knowledge comes from three sources, and only three sources:

• Several chapters from Perl black book
• Perl doc
• By receiving and giving on this site.

It was the summer of last year, I went to work for a different site of my previous company. I was asked to create a testing tool in Perl. I didn't know anything about Perl, other than vaguely knowing that it was a programming language. But I was quite experienced in IT in general, so I knew what I needed from Perl. I borrowed that Perl black book from someone, and started reading. I didn't have time for the entire book, as I was expected to deliver, so I only read the parts I really needed, like:

• How to do socket programming in Perl,
• How to use collection, like array and hash,
• How to control flow, like while, if, for etc.
• Part of my background was Java, so I naturally picked up Perl OO from the very beginning.

The project was a success, and that's the only project I did in Perl. But I fell in love with Perl, and after that I started to create various tools for myself in Perl. If you ask me, why I loved Perl: Rapid development + Simple + Regexp.

Other than that black book, I never read another Perl book, and as a matter of fact, I never owned any Perl book myself.

I always believe that a programmer cannot dig out things from document and experiment, is not a good programmer. It was not easy to read Perl document, not because the content is hard, but because Perl document is not really well organized, at least for novice.

Did I find this site through google? I cannot remember, but once I hit this site for the first time, I quickly figured out that this was a very useful Perl resource. I guess everyone had the experience that, sometime one even don't know which document to check for the answer of a particular problem, and sometime the answer is spreaded in several documents. For a novice that's too much, from time to time, when I needed some quick enlightment, I came to this forum to ask fellow monks.

Giving is also a good way to learn. By writing up replies, and implemeting and testing demo codes, I learned a lot. Even when it is not something new to me, trying to answer it refreshes my memory. Sometime I saw questions I didn't have answers, but through digging into the document and conducting experiment myself, I helped myself at the same time when I helped others.