I definitely agree with point 3. While I can appreciate people's need to sometimes learn thing for themselves, I can remember being new to Perl, and getting stumped by very trivial irritating little problems, that an experienced perl coder could have spotted in an instant.
To a newbie, perl docs can seem daunting and often make heavy reading. Plus which, may students may not be able to afford a complete set of O'Reilly books, so finding a good source of information to help you tackle problems may be difficult.
Just to clarify, I am not advocating giving people complete answers to these 'homework' questions, but the posts do seem to fall into 2 categories:

  1. "I'm trying to do (bizzare / simple / fairly obvious operation in perl), and have no idea how to do it. Can someone give me some help?"
    Generally, the poster gives the impression of at least having attemped a problem, broken it down into parts, having got stuck on one of those parts, and asking for help with that part of the problem.(e.g. Bi-directional communication between 2 clients and 1 server over a single socket)
    Such questions sometimes could also just about be legitimate (though only from a fairly naive individual), so I am inclined to give the poster the benefit of the doubt.

  2. "I need to write a perl script to do (something completely pointless, for instance keeping track of what colour your dogs are)."
    Looks like it's been c&p'd straight from a textbook (e.g. Finite Automaton)
    I think we all agree that these kinds of questions don't deserve to be answered.

Basically, I think it boils down to whether they are using PerlMonks as a source of information, or just as a source of answers.

In reply to RE: RE: HOMEWORK abounds by kilinrax
in thread HOMEWORK abounds by merlyn

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.