[racket] Neophyte Alert

Dear Racketeers,
I'm (comparatively) young, and so also not familiar with the social protocols of IRC & newsgroups in the world of software development. My basic question is whether there is a place that explains the etiquette of interacting with the Racket & PLT communities. Or perhaps just a few sentences detailing how to use the ListServ effectively? Because you all do seem to be wonderfully active and helpful, but I'm just not sure how to jump in. 

But before you direct me to How to Design Programs: I don't think I'm that much of a n00blet. A representative sample of the sorts of questions I've wanted to ask more experienced people include:
-- In learning about continuations & how they can be used in web servers, I'm really reminded of Haskell's use of monads to accumulate state. How similar are monads and continuations? Am I falling into some conceptual trap by linking them?
-- Is there any sort of general practice or prevailing taste in when to use (for example) null vs empty vs (list)? What about (let ([...])) vs (local (define ...))? 
-- When is it appropriate to use RackUnit, and when should Contracts be used instead?

(it's not necessary to answer these questions now, unless you're eager to; asking them on their own later will probably help keep discussions clear)

A tiny bit of my context, in the chance that it's helpful: 20-year-old undergrad rewriting a research lab's web app in Racket because I inherited thousands of lines of messy pseudo-OO PHP.

A preemptive thank you for helping!
--Josh Tilles

P.S. Has anyone given any thought to consolidating some of the Racket discussion to a StackExchange site? Or something else of that ilk?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/attachments/20110831/6b75ea80/attachment.html>