[sf-lug] Tutorial vs Reference Documentation

[aaronco36]

Subject: Tutorial vs Reference Documentation
(Was 'Re: SF-LUG meeting of Monday, 15 August 2016'[1] )

Quoting Rick Moen (rick at linuxmafia.com)
>> Sadly, man pages are generically a poor vehicle for learning about
>> software -- because that's just not the _type_ of documentation 
>> they are.
>> 
>> Computer documentation gets broadly divided into two categories:
>> 
>> 1.  Tutorial: something you read to learn about a topic
>> 2.  Reference: something you consult to find details about 
>> something you're already familiar with.

As a reminder in the below 'References' section ;), the CLI 
'Info' help facility[2] is yet *another* "reference"-type of 
computer documentation in addition to man pages.
The 'Info' help facility seems to heavily rely upon hypertext 
links (officially called "nodes") for navigating among the 
many related documentation topics, which man pages don't do.

OTOH, I think William Shotts' book 'The Linux Command Line'[3] 
is much more of a bona fide Tutorial to learning about the CLI 
(free-as-in-beer downloadable TLCL-16.07 PDF available here[4]. 
Rick M's Linuxmafia.com Knowledgebase[5] is another collection 
of assorted tutorials to learn about numerous related topics.


Quoting Rick Moen (rick at linuxmafia.com)
>> Note:  Even the above tutorials assume that you merely want to learn
>> about the particular _tool_ discussed, but assume you already have a
>> basic fluency with partitioning in general.  Be careful what you ask
>> for:  As Prof. Tolkien might have written if he'd lived in the current age,
>> 'Ask not the Internet for advice, for it will give you verbatim what 
>> you asked for, good and hard.'  Point is, if you _first_ need 
>> basic background on disk partitioning, you should read up on that first.

Maybe as a second "tutorial"-type read, there is also Karsten M. 
Self's 'Linux Partitioning mini-FAQ'[6], last edited back in 2010.

Hope that this helps.
-A


=============
References:
=============
[1]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2016q3/012138.html 

[2]http://www.computerhope.com/unix/info.htm 

[3]http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php 

[4]http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxcommand/files/TLCL/16.07/TLCL-16.07.pdf/download 

[5]http://linuxmafia.com/kb/ 

[6]http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Linux/FAQs/partition.html 
=============


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