Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1999 18:25:31 +1100 From: jonathan michaels <jon@caamora.com.au> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Complete FreeBSD, 3rd edition (was: Printed man pages (was: Looking for the best webmaster.)) Message-ID: <19990109182531.H5652@caamora.com.au> In-Reply-To: <19990108191849.A63511@scientia.demon.co.uk>; from Ben Smithurst on Fri, Jan 08, 1999 at 07:18:49PM %2B0000 References: <36936F9C.33BAFF88@uk.radan.com> <19990108125205.J92409@freebie.lemis.com> <36956DBB.B16BBF23@netshell.vicosa.com.br> <19990108192008.D1504@caamora.com.au> <19990108191849.A63511@scientia.demon.co.uk>
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On Fri, Jan 08, 1999 at 07:18:49PM +0000, Ben Smithurst wrote: > jonathan michaels wrote: > > > my apologies if this is too harch to cope with, but thier are people in this > > world who have reasons to use books, and not all because they cannot use teh > > cheap monitors that are being supplied these days. > > I partly agree with this. If there's a lot of stuff I want to learn, a > book is nice, which is why I've just bought the Camel book. On the other > hand, there doesn't seem much point digging around for a book[1], looking > through it for the right page, etc, when "man foo" will tell you quick > answers much faster. yup ... but, if you all would allow me to ramble a bit, please. i went down to my library recently to see if i could get some specific books as a prelude to purhasing them (specificaly teh evi nemeth tomes). my library is like average libraries and USED to have a case full of this neat little 5x8 cards with book details all set out a to z. i'd browse thise shelves for hours doing research, well now they have a damnable database on computer .. not like amazon.com or even a textual synopsis of teh book in a wais database so one could do an intelligent wais search followed up by a human logic fuzzy search on teh output. thye pit the entire cardfile system into a ms windows based database and provide some very primitive tools to do searches .. basic alpha_char on limited fileds type of searches. after half an hour of this i gave up and left, even though i could sit down, the old crd draers were a standup operation .. not the sort of thing a person with arthritis relishes. this is part of teh point i am making with books as opposed to manpages on small tv screens .. grin with a book you can do some much more productive 'learning' and folowup, whereas with a manpage you already have to know exactly what it is that you want ... i recently discovered xman on my xfree bin kit, it was such a revelation, almost as good as having a real book, but the sereen got to me soon enough. > -- > [1] on my desk, that part would take the longest, I assure you > -- me too ben, but tfor me that is teh 'learning experience', i als value serendipity, which is why i hate computeried learning so much. regards and thx jonathan -- =============================================================================== Jonathan Michaels PO Box 144, Rosebery, NSW 1445 Australia ===========================================================<jon@caamora.com.au> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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