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Postings from November 2003
Shlomi Fish wrote: > > At one point, I suggested the reader that he can now go over the man pages > and should. However, my friend complained that the man pages were hard to > understand, and I can relate to it, as they are certainly not intended for > people with very little background in UNIX. I'd like to point out that the perl manpages are intented to be exactly that : manpages -- reference documentation, complete but yet concise. To draw a comparison, I doubt anyone can learn the basics of using a Unix shell by reading in a row and from cover to cover sh(1), ls(1), rm(1) and the like. > I recommended him to buy the Camel Book, which is a good read even for > people who are very good programmers. Still, it was a bit pricy for him > (220 NIS or $40). At the moment he is using a pirated version he found on > the Net somewhere. (of the second edition). "Learning Perl" would be a more obvious choice IMHO. (BTW may I point out that O'Reilly has a lower-price program for user groups ? and that books can be shared ?) > For a long time, I complained that the Perl man pages were probably > intended for either experienced Perl 4 programmers or for seasoned UNIX > shell/sed/awk/whatever hackers. But naturally, reality wanted otherwise > and Perl is now being learned by people with very little experience of > either. Agreed. > Those people could perhaps get started by reading Simon Cozens' "Beginning > Perl" book or whatever, but still need a good reference. This is either > "Programming Perl" or the man pages. Ultimately, the man pages *are* the reference, and vice versa. I'd be happy to apply any improvement to the man pages, But I still think that, as a reference documentation, they need to suppose a minimal level of knowledge about programming and systems. For example, I don't see the point of explaining what perl's exec() does without supposing that the programmer can refer to the exec(3) manpage and understand it. The FAQs and the *tut* pods have a little different purpose (and it should be noted that the FAQs are maintained separately.)