On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 03:43:30PM -0400, Fred Lieberman wrote:
> Hi Scott,
>
> Thanks for realizing that I am a newbie and this subject is difficult for me. Unfortunately, most educators and people who write books on this subject have no idea how to communicate to a person like me.
>
> I will first check the second webpage. The first one may be well above my understanding and will take me a long time to decode.
>
Much of the Linux documentation project seems aimed at the more advanced
user. FreeBSD, as one example and the ArchLinux wiki, as another, are
examples of documentation more aimed at getting the job done. While
understanding everything is great, I do remember a friend having their
article turned down for the TLDP (The Linux Documentation Project).
This particular person writes excellent docs, and our joke was that it
must have been too clear. :)
The way it usually works is that the more advanced write for the more
advanced--it's often difficult for we who have been using it for awhile
to remember how frustrating it was at first, where to understand A, you
had to understand B first, but to understand that required C, and so
on---as a friend once said, about setting something up, "To be pointed
to cryptic documentation, that tells me to create SSL authentication for
smtp as if it were a self-standing instruction, requires more effort
than I'm willing to give it."
In many ways, a newcomer can write better docs than an expert. For
example, I might write, get the tarball, extract it, and do the usual
.configure, make, make install. This will be clear to the experienced,
but the novice may not even know what a tarball is. (It's a compressed
archive file, and not important at this moment.) Whereas the newcomer
will realize that the even newer comer will not really be helped by such
instructions.
Anyway, try the cyberciti link I gave--that is actually chock-full of
useful, simply written articles.
--
Scott Robbins
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