Turning the Tide on Perl's Attitude Toward Beginners

An AC sent in this article at perl.com which discusses new perl mailing lists set up especially to answer beginners' questions. Hopefully they're not all being answered with "Go buy Learning Perl" or something like that.

Comments

RTFM? Not always.

[sachachua]

RTFM isn't the universally appropriate approach. It really depends on your learning style. Some people learn better by paging through tons of documentation, often rereading things until they make sense. This approach tends to be rather intimidating, so newbies get easily scared off. Others prefer to learn by talking to people who are either also learning or already good at it. Still others prefer to jump right in, learning Perl while using it in a project.

So, see, RTFM doesn't always work. We're way too biased towards the visually-oriented person who knows how to read documentation and where to find the information he or she needs - a very useful skill, mind you. We often fail to note that there are other, equally important alternatives.