Before asking a question in a usenet group Newsgroup Lang.Perl.Misc, the mailing list of a local local Perl Mongers group or in the question section of Perl Monks, you better have read and experimented yourself, started the beginning of a script and experimened with it, checked the error messages and solved as many of these errors as you can, in other words, did al you can to find the answer to the problem.

Before asking a question, pinpoint the location in your script that most likely is the cause of the problem. Most of the time, that means that you can present up to 5 lines of code. When your code contains more lines, you will be asked often to dig deeper in your code to get closer to the problem. If you don't dig deeper yourself, somebody else has to do it for you, and that means that (s)he is doing your work, while not getting paid for it.