When you're new to a subject or can't judge the quality of information on your own, Google might not be that helpful. Indeed, there are plenty of crappy perl tutorials that are easy to find.

You aren't doing their work for them if they ask you where to get the docs and you tell them. You don't want to waste your time telling him where to look, but you'll post about how he doesn't meet your standards. Don't be a jerk.

Let's all play nice and friendly. If we made everyone find out things on their own, then we wouldn't need Perlmonks. If you don't like helping people, don't post. There are plenty of us who are much more willing to be nice to the newbies.

I agree that quality information can be tricky to find.

I guess I came across harsher than I intended to sound like. Maybe it's my mentality that I prefer to ask only very rarely.

I didn't say that I would be wasting my time, as I wrote I considered helping. The only reason I posted a reply to tirwhan, after I've seen he replied the question already, is that I know people are more willing to help if the one asking did what he could and says so.

I have no problems with helping. I didn't suggest that people should find out things on their own only, just that asking things better could lead to better replies.

Btw, I'm generally a friendly person. I'm new here too at PM, so I guess people just don't know me yet.

Well, whatever you feel appropriate. Personally, putting these two resources into a reply was little to no effort. Not everyone is as comfortable with Google as you or I seem to be and if someone is new to Perl they may not be aware of the mod_perl site. Pointing it out to them is beneficial to both them and the rest of PM, because a lot of questions that would otherwise have ended up here can be answered by reading that site.

I'm not saying you're wrong and I might react the same way on a different day, but we do aim to provide a newbie-friendly face to PM (I think), which sometimes means giving answers to imperfect questions.

Don't you think it's beneficial to have it appear in SuperSearch now also, as a result of this thread?

Isn't that the point of this site? If answering simple questions is beneith you then why respond at all?

Let us consider for a moment that this was not an attempt to do someone's homework for them, but rather to point them towards the resources they need to do it themselves. How is such a response not appropriate?

If someone says to you "How do I get to the library from here, I have a term paper due?" does that imply that they want you to do the paper for them? Do you refuse to give them directions?

I suppose it could be argued that in doing so you're forcing them to be more self-reliant. However IMHO such 'tough love' is the role of a parent/mentor, not that of a community promoting knowledge.

"Don't you think it's beneficial to have it appear in SuperSearch now also, as a result of this thread?"

I just checked Super Search. There are two different threads with exactly the same title and content. I guess it could be argued that they got outdated since 2001, but as far as I checked it the links were roughly the same and that was not the point you were arguing.

As for the rest of your post please read my reply here.