Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 07:40:15 +1000 From: "Doug Young" <dougy@gargoyle.apana.org.au> To: "SILVER, MICHAEL A" <MSILVER@scana.com>, "'Neil Blakey-Milner'" <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org> Cc: "'freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG>, "'Rick Hamell'" <hamellr@aracnet.com> Subject: Re: new books, changing my pt. of view Message-ID: <01be01bffcca$40e8b890$847e03cb@ROADRUNNER> References: <DBB3921EFE2AD211A81500A0C9B5FE7605794533@msg04.scana.com>
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> The problem lies in the gap between experienced UNIX admins and > inexperienced UNIX users, like myself (striving to be an admin). Certain > knowledge of UNIX is assumed, not purposely by the doc writers, but the doc > writer already have this knowledge. Many "newbies" simply don't have this > knowledge. This is something many of us have been saying for ages .... its because the people who write docs are typically extremely experienced that they are not the ideal people for the job. This issue is not something peculiar to FreeBSD, but certainly the situation is far worse with open source software than with commercial equivalents. It almost seems an insult to those that document FreeBSD to have > simple step by step instructions on doing very specific mundane tasks, > however this is what many of us require. Ummmm .... I just checked this was the right list, but yes it IS the "newbies" one so discussion relevant to newbies is presumably on the allowable list of topics ... heated or otherwise !!!!! Whats the purpose of documentation anyway ?? If it can't be readily comprehended by those who need it then its totally useless. Whilst many "die-hards" will shudder at the thought, providing a heap of screen dumps in the existing docs would go a long way toward filling in the gaps. The lack of complete info doesn't only concern newbies however .... even those of us who have been around IT for yonks struggle with something unfamiliar if its not documented properly. (To this day I refuse to purchase a VCR because I've yet to meet one that comes with intelligible instructions.) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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