On 01/02/07, Richard Lynch <ceo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Actually, I suspect most people at least make some kind of attempt to read docs before posting here... Reading does not guarantee comprehension. For that matter, reading WHICH docs is always an interesting challenge. Clearly, nobody can read *ALL* the docs. And it's very very very easy when entering a new domain to read and comprehend what seems like a reasonable amount of documentation, but still be missing some crucial fundamental bit of information. This is often-times, in my experience, because: A) Documentation assumes a certain knowledge level way higher than I actually had. B) Documentation glossed over something "basic" in such a way that did not make it clear just how important/crucial that bit of info was. I have no problem believing that the OP read the php.net IMAP pages but didn't know that a single email could be stored in a file and treated as an mbox. Similarly, knowing that email is MIME encoded does not mean that one should automatically know that MIME is the keyword commonly used to find/describe the software, nor that that's the result you should examine. Most email is in Latin-1, ASCII, or UTF-8 these days, yet you wouldn't search for those when trying to learn something about pasrsing a single email, would you? Throw in some second language difficulties, and I have to say that maybe certain people were a bit hasty in their assumptions about the effort expended by the OP... Perhaps NEXT TIME we could avoid some of this noise?...
Excellent point of view, Richard. I bother the php list with a lot less questions now than I did two years ago not because I've learned the language better, but because from reading the list continually I've learned a lot of new keywords to google on. That's the whole trick, and like you said it is impossible to RTFM and comprehend the whole thing in one shot. No matter how many times I read the section on PCRE I sometimes get stuck for hours before I land on one keyword and then I can google properly. Thanks for being considerate, and always helpful. Dotan Cohen http://lyricslist.com/lyrics/artist_albums/20/aerosmith.html http://what-is-what.com/what_is/bluetooth.html -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
