It's just coming up on 2mo. since I picked up my first O'Reilly book on Perl and joined Perl Monk's. I'm a complete novice at programming, the most complicated scripts I've written before coming here are some awk routines to copy a few files around.

For me, this has been a treasure trove find. The level of intellect, in general, is well above the par of any of the IRC or usenet groups I've participated in; and there is more a feel of actually continuity and community (homenodes are a nice touch) than almost all the mailing lists I've ever subscribed too.

As someone said before, the signal to noise ratio is great here. I'm constantly following old nodes and reading through them, and I'm sure to be engaged in this activity for quite some time: That is something you just can't do with usenet or email due to the glutt of inane and useless posts.

Super Search and the Q&A are some other wonderful tools. Every time I just can't get around syntax or would like a more elegant way to do something, it's often already sitting there under "hash" or "sorting" when I'm ready for some help. If it's not, from the quality of the answers I've seen there, I'm confident asking would quickly yield a bunch of helpful suggestions.

Being in a highly technical proffession, I understand the RTFM reflex. I spent a month lurking, just to get a feel for the community, before I posted anything. When I did, I exhausted all my resource (within reason) before hand then made sure to put thought and effort into it before taking others time. I think this is something many users miss, that by asking a question they are taking from the people they ask it of. When a users asks a questions that has already been answered 3e10^9 times and is easily accessed by anyone with even the most rudimentary reading skills, they're implicity stating that they don't value you in any meaningful way. However when presented with what seems like an honestly thoughtful question, even one off low skill, people are happy to share their knowledge.

Getting back to the article, if it's advocating offering free consulting/programming to anyone who comes in with a CGI script downloaded from some website and no prior thought but a vague notion of what they want to do, then I can completely understand a so called 'elitist' attitude. No one likes to do work for someone who doesn't appreciate it (especially for free). If on the other hand it meant giving support to people who were really trying but needed some guidance, I'd like to offer up the following example:

I think a really nice case in differences in attitude is Tiefling's post on his RPG effort. He's obviously as new as I to Perl, but by conveying a real interest and thought into his post he drew tons of (hopefully for him) enlightenting responses. The one trollish/AOLish sounding post towards him was "totally harshed" in the words of its author.

To continue using the above as an example, he drew suggestions and guidance towards resources to check out. Snippets of code were offered to puzzle through, along with hints towards their resolution. Monks were also more than happy to offer clarification of concepts when asked thoughful questions. To someone who really wants to learn these are invaluable. In fact that thread in particular cemented my feeling that I'd enjoy this community.

So to the question, "[Is] Perl Monks good for Beginners?" if you qualify it with "who truely want to learn the language", I'd answer a resounding Yes.