Whenever you have a problem or question while programming, odds are almost guaranteed that someone else has already run into it and the odds are also very good that someone has already written about it somewhere. Before you jump right to asking a question on a forum, I strongly recommend that you do your own searching. First of all, you want to save the valuable time of the community members. If they are constantly answering the same questions over and over again, they are dedicating a lot less time to truly new questions. Second, you will often find that you discover the answer for yourself in the process of formulating your thoughts, on how to search for it. Lastly, you will become much better at searching for programming related problems as you practice it more. Forums are usually going to be very slow compared to finding your own answer and obviously time is money.
Most of the time when you use a search engine to look up a problem; you will find two main types of resources...