Getting Help in the Drupal Community

I've been thinking a lot about what the major hurdles are to learn Drupal. One obstacle I've encountered is even learning how to ask questions effectively in the forums and how to interact with the community. Someone posted this article How to Ask Questions from Hackers and it really helped me understand how community supported help systems work and what info I should include in my questions. However, the tone in that article is a little harsh and I think we could make a friendlier version that's more Drupal Community specific. The goal would be to create a reference doc for new users to help them ask for help; this would be an expectation management page for what community help is and isn't (e.g. Open Source is volunteer based so no one has to help you but someone might if you ask nicely and in a concise way) and best practice for their posts.

If there's a duplicate thread somewhere please let me know. I've Googled but "Drupal help" is such a broad topic I get thousands of results.