"></a>General Overview</h5><p>This section provides a general overview of monoids. This is one subsection that you might not get immediately. Because of the level of abstraction, it's recommended that you don't spend a lot of time on this section, and instead come back to it after reading the subsequent sections and writing code that uses this stuff to get a feel for it.</p><p>The idea of a monoid is to represent something that's <i>appendable</i> or combinable in a general way.</p><p>Monoids come up consta