Reading the source gives you the confidence to tackle bigger projects. Once you realize what a complete and utter hack job most of the projects you use are it g

Reading the source gives you the confidence to tackle bigger projects. Once you realize what a complete and utter hack job most of the projects you use are it gives you the confidence to just build your own hackjob, or take their project and fix it. For me the biggest one was an FTP library, all it did was figure out when the server stopped sending data for a particular command and then run a Regex over it, populate an array of objects and return them. Unread source is like a David Copperfield trick, it's magic, once you read the source and know how it's done the magic is lost and you understand what is really going on behind the hand waving.