While I agree that most of the Off Topic questions are from an experienced Perl users perspective nothing to do with Perl, from a very inexperienced new user's point of view all bound together into the same topic.

Many of the popular Perl books that someone would find on an average book shop's shelf are called things like "Perl/CGI", "Learn Perl/CGI in 21 days", "PERL for the WWW" and so on. Therefore most people assume that Perl is CGI, and Perl is WWW. I know there are better books, but the big shiny ones, with a CD-ROM promising instant knowledge seem to appeal more...

To make matters worse most web servers are Apache on *nix, so any problem with CGI because of miss-configuration of the server, or permissions problems must also be Perl related. Most people are use to using Windows, and given that most people can't even use that properly, one does wonder what hope they have on a *nix box?

Most people therefore have poor/weak books to start with, don't know how to find the basic docs, assume everything to do with the web is PERL, and all too often are too impatient.

We all know that there are great books out there, we know how to Google, we know how to separate our problems out, and we take time think our problems through, and we ask sensible questions to the right people.

I don't know what we should do about the Clueless, but the Internet is full of them, and if left to their own devices they could do a lot of damage.......


--
ajt

In reply to Re: OT: Does this site need an by ajt
in thread OT: Does this site need an Off-Topic area? by Poblachtach32

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