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Re[2]: nebie questions



Ben Nes Michael <miki@canaan.co.il> wrote:

>  man pages r horrible, hard to understand and arranged very stupidly

"Hard to understand" and "arranged very stupidly" (assuming for a moment you're
right) is NOT a property of specific documentation format. It depends on the
human that wrote the docs. You can easily find a nice-looking hyper-text manual
with a lot of clickable cross-references and pictures which is difficult to
understand because it's badly (in the sense of cognition) designed.

>  Who can understand how to use tar from man page ? i didn't

Well, I did. So what?

>  man pages r good only to refresh what u already know

I'd put it other way around: man pages are good when you *know* enough to be in
a need of *refreshing* :). And that's what good books are for.

I don't say man pages is the best. But they're quite good for what they're
intended to be: a MANUAL pages. Not TEXT books.

And as to the format itself: it's quite rich. A lot of good-quality computer
books were prepared completely with *roff. And with a descent man page viewer
you'll be able to navigate through the references with comfort. Remember that
the default man(1) viewer has changed very little since the epoch when vi(1) was
proudly called a first VIsual editor. But though working with vi is definitely
would be considered "horrible" by a newbie coming to the Unix world in the end
of 90s, it doesn't mean that the idea of text editor is bad as such.

Regards,

Evgeny


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