If there are twenty characters that answer my question why not just post those twenty characters insted of a link (which in itself is more than twenty characters)?

Several general reasons born experience

Its faster for me, only takes about 3min with current perlmonks speed to copy/paste my FAQ links, instead of some 7min to load tutorial and copy/paste code, or 15min or longer to post tested/runnable code , or detailed explanation. And this is just for stuff I remember off the top of my head, that I've done often, that I don't have to search farther than my FAQ-answers file.

It teaches you where to find tutorials. Considerable time was spent writing the tutorial, it contains important basic information, and its always there, even when no perlmonks are logged in.

Volunteers like me like to see you Try It To See -- it is the only way to remember these things -- you'd be surprised how often the answer to an OPs question was a link to the last time the OP asked that question

It is a litmus test :) In my experience, if I post code it is very often blindly copy/pasted -- OP doesn't even notice the example variables I used aren't in his program. If I post a link to a direct answer, and the original poster doesn't click it and read the answer, I know not to waste my composing detailed replies for this person. They seek a guru/master style of teaching, and that doesn't work on web-forums, it requires explicit agreement, and its simply not expected on web-forums. Spoon-feeding is a perversion of guru/master style -- its work. I like to help people, but it is not satisfying if I feel like I'm doing all the work. I want money for work :)

Look: I don't want to become an expert in the field of decoding. I just want to put to work a routine the essence of which is not decoding. If I spend days solving peripheral problems I get nowhere.

:) Well :) technically, ikegami "solved it" not you :) But you don't become an expert by reading a 5min tutorial :)

I think its a problem that you consider this basic knowledge "peripheral" problems -- the more you skip, the more you risk, the longer it takes :) encoding/decoding is right up there with knowing how paths and filehandles work. Communicating with anything outside your program involves escape/unescape, encode/decode, freeze/thaw, explode/unexplode, pack/unpack, serialize/deserialize.

Consider your followup Re^2: Array manipulation how to. Yes, perlmonks is a good place to get those kind of answer, but it should be just as fast to find without live nude perlmonks behind a keyboard :) Tutorials: Arrays: A Tutorial/Reference, http://learn.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/ Ch 3, Modern Perl page 38, Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

Hi