Having a good technical know-how is one thing, but being able to effectively use the osCommerce community is at times equally important. Part of learning how to use osCommerce effectively must, at some point, take into account that no one needs to develop applications in isolation. The opportunity to learn from other peoples' mistakes before you fall into the same traps is a great boon for budding website developers. Even better, once you have encountered a problem, it is a pretty safe bet that someone else probably would have had that same problem and already dealt with it, which means that a solution might be available on the forums.
Apart from providing ready-made solutions to problems, as well as a huge repository of information, the osCommerce community is a living entity with which we can all interact. Exchanging ideas and information is an integral part of learning and the open source ethos suits the learning-as-a-collective paradigm very well. Just...