It's nice that PerlMonks is seen as a friendlier place to get help than, say, comp.lang.perl.misc, but I think that the reasons why most questions get an RTFM reply in clpm still apply here.

• There's the old "teach a man to fish" argument. We could hand you a fish every time you come to us, but it's ultimately more satisying for everyone if we run fishing lessons.
• There's also the question of accuracy. The Perl docs have been read by every Perl expert over a number of years. Most (if not all) of the inaccuracies have been ironed out. You can be sure that the answer you get from perldoc will be correct. Everything you get here is just a monk's opinion. That opinion may well be spot on, but until you have been here long enough to know who's who, how do you know who to trust?

Sometimes I hear people say that the Perl docs are too big and it's hard to find your way around. This was one of the reasons why I wrote the RTFM series of articles in Perlmonth.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

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