How to Get Help Online
If you are stuck, don't spend days running around alone—ask for help. One of the best things about Arduino is its community. You can always find help if you can describe your problem well.
Get the habit of cutting and pasting things into a search engine and see whether somebody is talking about it. For example, when the Arduino IDE spits out a nasty error message, copy and paste it into a Google search and see what comes out. Do the same with bits of code you're working on or just a specific function name. Look around you: everything has been invented already and it's stored somewhere on a web page.
For further investigation, start from the www.arduino.cc main website and look at the FAQ (www.arduino.cc/en/Main/FAQ), then move on to the playground (www.arduino.cc/playground), a freely editable wiki that any user can modify to contribute documentation. It's one of the best parts of the whole open source philosophy. People contribute documentation and examples of anything you can do with Arduino. Before you start a project, search the playground and you'll find a bit of code or a circuit diagram to get you started.
If you still can't find an answer that way, search the forum (www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl). If that doesn't help, post a question there. Pick the correct board for your problem: there are different areas for software or hardware issues and even forums in five different languages. Please post as much information as you can:
What Arduino board ...
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