The most valuable thing you can do, is to provide documentation -- in whatever form -- of all the difficulties you encounter when learning something new, and how you overcame them. As a beginner, you have a different perspective than the language designer or module developer. And generally, documentation tends to be written by experts, for experts, which can make it hard for a beginner to get started. Since the documentation writer is an expert, it can be hard for them to remember what it was like as a beginner.

This is actually relevant for everyone: no matter how much experience you have with Perl (or programming) in general, you'll try out new modules all the time, and each time, you're a beginner with respect to that module. Keeping a diary of your initial struggles might help the next person trying that module. And someone with writer skills (that could be you!) might actually turn that into proper documentation that could be contributed to the project in question.

So go ahead and write whatever you think could help someone else in your position.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.