> > Man pages are not tutorials or complete manuals > > Yes they are, or should be. They used to be.
Fairly complete manuals, yes; tutorials, I don't think they ever were. The manual page for the fortran compiler says what the compiler options are -- it does not teach you programming in fortran; the vi manual page say what the different key presses do -- it does not teach you how to use vi effectively; etc. There have always been separate tutorial books for those aspects. The manpages instead were terse. Of course that doesn't mean you couldn't learn using the programs from them. Good ones even included examples for illustration of ideas.
