the only reservation i have about your comments is that i'm leery about the characterization of the adoption of working solutions as cargo cult programming. from what i've seen in others as well as myself, we all tend to iterate through ascending (hopefully) levels of expertise, becoming more sophisticated with this or that as we develop. cookbooks can provide a structure for what at first seems overwhelming. isn't that partially the role of the perl cookbook?
which is not to say that i haven't seen people get trapped in that mode, so i do understand your point.
