I think it is important to remember that sometimes it is difficult to know what to look up in the documentation.

I'll give an example from my own experience. When I first used PerlMonks, I was very new to Perl (5 days or so) and I was trying to search for all the positions of a regrex in a string (original post here). I knew about index, but had not yet come across the pos function in my reading.
Sure, I would have read about it eventually as I learned the language, but I was learning the language by writing this program. Maybe I was over-reaching, but I was trying to solve a problem. I couldn't look up a function I didn't know the name of, so I posted a simple question.

The two excellent responses by Russ and btrott were just what I needed. They gave me the answer (the pos function), a little about the function, and even some sample code. From there, I was able to look up more on the pos function and continue programming and learning perl without delay.

Without knowing about pos, it would have taken me a while to discover it on my own. There are definitely questions that are too basic, but (aside from homework questions) they really don't hurt anything.

If you feel a question is too simple, just don't answer it. That might let someone a little less experienced in the language answer it and help someone out.

Again, my thanks to Russ and btrott, who helped me with what was a simple question.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.