[skinnybatch]

Wholeheartedly agree. Specific to the actual trial and error, of programming, when I first started learning C++ (a long time ago), I remember the dread of running the debug. Then coming up with a small number of errors in 10's of 1000's of lines of code, and having to comb through to see where I was missing a semi-colon… I think knowing to how to code from ground up is so important. Knowing the fundamentals, and not just knowing how to manipulate someone else's platform. Once you know how to do it, you can make the choice to take shortcuts, but if you start with the shortcuts, and they become unavailable, you're up a creek… I have a web-designer friend of mine that knows how to use Wordpress CSS very well. He can manipulate and research to problem solve. But I'd put dollars to donuts that if I asked him to write a CSS or any other program for that matter from scratch, he wouldn't have the foggiest.

I know this GitHub is geared toward helping students getting ideas up, running, and selling, so toward the latter, it's invaluable, and actually quite generous. I'm still an old fuddy-duddy, and think that it's best to understand how to build the mechanism before buying it off the shelf.