I thought your post at Re: CGI Design was an excellent reply. My main problem with posting code is that the person asking the question won't learn as much as if they read the relevant documentation, this was not the case with your reply.
As you state, the docs for some things can be overwhelming at times. In order to prevent people from being scared off, it's important to specifically point them to what they need to read (oversimplified example - don't say 'read perldoc' say 'read perldoc -f map'). If you're willing to spend the time to provide them with the relevant information within your reply, as you did, that's even better. The combination of code specifically addressing their question and an explanation of what it does makes it even easier to learn from :).
