this method is usefull, especially considering that it came before l'hopital.
I tried to solve
this
and after a while of l'hopitaling I thought "hey! if it worked for the last one why can't it work here?", so I did it again here and it worked alot better.
as my teacher always says, l'hopital is like a super cannon, but it's so strong that you might not want to use it.
sure, it can make problems like

a crapload simplier, but it can get to some pretty annoying dead ends or just extremely complicated paths.
oops I have an error, that's simple even without l'hopital.
however...

is much more difficult.
as for an explanation to what a limit is I posted it some time ago, but I guess it was in the Spam Thread.
in short it's where the function
should go at a point, ignoring the value the function actually has at that point.
for example x^2/x has a limit at (0,0), though x^2/x is not defined at that point.