Re^2: Small Perl quests for a beginner?

There's one downside with this approach: many questions that a beginner could answer with his Perl skills are ambiguous and lack context to resolve the ambiguity.

Usually you don't have this problem with "contrived examples", as you call them, and neither with real-world problems. But for beginners it's often hard to judge if a problem can be solved with reasonable effort. Which is why they go back to "contrived" problems.

(I don't want to discourage anybody from answering questions here; I merely think that it's not the best way for the average beginner).

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Re^3: Small Perl quests for a beginner?
by GrandFather (Saint) on Dec 03, 2008 at 22:26 UTC

Actually that's not a downside! PerlMonks SoPW provides a pretty fair slice of how information is presented in the real world. Very often "programming" problems aren't, they are really problems elucidating the actual problem then solving that (which often is fairly trivial).

Following along on the process of digging out the information needed to describe a a problem then solving it is not at all a bad way of seeing how that process works (or doesn't work). Writing the code to solve the problem then comparing it to the (often) many answers provided by others with a range of skills using a variety of techniques provides much better insight than the (generally) single "answer" provided in a book or similar resource. Being able to follow up a solution with questions about how and why makes learning in the PerlMonks context way more effective than any formal self study course or even than many class.

Perl's payment curve coincides with its learning curve.

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