Programmers can be quite generous in offering help and support to others starting out; however, be sure to be polite and respectful. When debugging an error, trying to figure out how to go about doing something: or trying to understand how a particular feature works, online forums can be quite helpful.

A good example of an online forum is Stack Overflow, where users can post questions to a large community of developers of varying levels of experience. In addition, the developers of a given package will often have a mailing list where they will offer help to users trying to use the package. This is a good place to go if, for example, it is unclear from the documentation how to do exactly what you want.

A general rule of thumb when looking for help from others is that if you are being inefficient with other people's time, you probably aren't using your own time that well either. Before seeking help, it's good practice to do what you can to try to understand and solve the problem on your own. Make sure you look through your code thoroughly to see if you can identify an error; if it's not too hard, consult the documentation to look for your solution and search for previous posts that may answer your question. When looking for help, be as specific as possible about the problem you are trying to solve or the question that you have, and follow the guidelines of whatever forum or mailing list you are using (they are probably similar to what I've mentioned earlier).