I think it's the individual differences between deductive and inductive learning styles at play here. Inductive learners, like myself, prefer to see examples a

I think it's the individual differences between deductive and inductive learning styles at play here. Inductive learners, like myself, prefer to see examples and derive general rules. Deductive learning style is more about learning the generality first and moving on to examples. Different strokes for different folks. I too learned like you, I first learned Perl by trial and error example and the wonderfully awesome Learning Perl. I learned Java by frustratingly going through it, but once I got it I got it. Learning object oriented Perl and Python feel trivial now, thanks to that experience. Python, btw, feels like it needs to be practiced instead of learned, since I already have the concepts and generalities down. The question of this thread is, how do we teach beginners the concepts in an interesting way. I realize how much of a genius Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz are when I see threads like this.