Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 12:15:50 +1100 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: David Chavarria <davidc@huyett.com> Cc: FreeBSD Newbies <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Hard words [was: Dictionary of Terms] Message-ID: <20030314121550.J67648@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <KAEAKMACDAGFNDDHIBJIOEGPCAAA.davidc@huyett.com>; from davidc@huyett.com on Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 02:15:59PM -0600 References: <KAEAKMACDAGFNDDHIBJIOEGPCAAA.davidc@huyett.com>
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On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 02:15:59PM -0600, David Chavarria wrote:
> I like the man pages and the handbook, but I was wondering if anyone knew
> of a dictionary that alphabetically listed FreeBSD/Unix terms?
>
> Or, is my best bet to just man a term I don't know when I come across it?
Some of those words will have man pages, but for a while I've been
concerned about another group of words that newbies might struggle with.
These are ordinary everyday words that have been adopted with a
specific relevance to unix which isn't always very clear despite
the familiarity of the word. Also it can be a bit hard to translate
from the word's everyday concept to the unix concept.
Some other words are just plain English words, but not ones we all
use often. Some people would use or hear them in their work or study
while others would never encounter them. Ten years ago the average
computer user had a large vocabulary and was in the habit of growing
it daily, but that is no longer the case. If you're sweating over a
man page about some new complex thingy, the last thing you need is
to be diverted by a difficult word or concept along the way.
Let me try to think of some examples...
recursive
precedence
canonical
dynamic
architecture
delimiting
collation
primaries
lexicographically
descend
string
precedence
hierarchy
default
operator
spool
traversal
pseudo
cooked
raw
affirmatively
escaped
superseded
interface
verbose
statically
contiguous
append
construct
implicit
adjacent
meta
truncated
indirection
operand
options
argument
parameter
reiteratively
asynchronous
I bet you're all saying that some of those words are easy, but not
everyone would agree on which are the easy words. New unix users
might find it easier to ask "what does inode mean" ( = I'm new to
this unix stuff) than "what does implicit mean" ( = personally I
don't have a good vocabulary).
Although all those words can be found in a dictionary, the dictionary
isn't going to help the task at hand very much. Most are not
likely to be found in a dictionary of computing because they're
regarded as ordinary English words.
You might also encounter concepts which a basic unix book or course
should make clear, though they often don't spell it out in a way
that's easy to look up:
link to/from
mounted on
links are followed
indirected through
soft limit
null string
span filesystems
rooted in
referenced by
mutually exclusive
Have other people been stalled by words like those listed above,
or is it not such a big deal after all?
This sort of problem is sometimes addressed in freebsd-questions,
where all FreeBSD help requests and answers should go.
On the other hand, in freebsd-newbies we can look at this stuff
preemptively (yikes there's another word!) in order to help
each other navigate the documentation for themselves, and it's
not really a question about FreeBSD after all.
If anyone has any ideas or resources that might help others to deal
with the general vocabulary, I'm sure your contribution would be
welcome.
--
Regards,
-*Sue*-
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