[finder83]

I wish I could say my experience matched yours, but SO is an extremely frustrating place for many of my errors and problems. I don't think it made programming worse, it did make it better...but it's far from a panacea, and often a question has answers that are so outdated that the solutions no longer work, the solutions aren't complete or have bugs, or it's close to my error but not the same error, or a different solution. I'd say that's my experience about 1/2 the time I use SO.

I picked up a book last month to learn Clojure...how does SO help to learn a language start to finish? I don't even typically refer to SO for syntax questions, I'm sure it has that information but it doesn't seem like a very convenient place to index it. But maybe that's my subset of languages...

I probably end up on stack overflow a few times a week, and it is helpful...but I'd be fine without it if Google would just return better results.