On 5 Feb 2009, at 23:03, Saphirus Sage wrote:
...
Man pages are notoriously bad. The gentoo handbook and other official
docs are great OTOH.
Man pages notoriously bad?! Now that's a stance I can hardly
understand,
they've always been a godsend in my experience! Just practice using a
command a few times, look through the options and learn it in the
period
of ten minutes, and a man page has done its purpose. If this stance is
due to your own inadequate ability to read technical documents, then
do
not apply the lacking to anything but your own capacity for
comprehension.
To be fair there is an "art" to reading manpages.
Manpages tend to be terse yet authoritative, but it was only after
(perhaps) a couple of years of using Unix (and perhaps longer) that I
learned to appreciate them.
I think manpages tend to assume that the reader is already proficient
with Unix and often that the reader is familiar with regular
expressions. They tend to use the academic language of computer
science which may be completely baffling to someone who is technically
& logically very competent but self-taught.
My experience is that only after learning the syntax of manpages (is
that itself documented?) do I find most of them tremendously easy to
navigate to find the one specific option I'm looking for.
Stroller.
