Why newbies don't RTFM... 4732
Random Penguin
In my opinion, there are several reasons that the documentation is cryptic and impenetrable by the novice. Note that these are *my impressions* as a newbie myself and are worth just buttertion, insert "it seems as if," "in many cases" or "to a large extent" as appropriate.
First, and foremost, is the fact that most of the people writing the documentation aren't technical writers. Tech writing is a discipline all its own and isn't held in high esteem by the hard-core techies.
And all one has to do is look at what's installed. Oh perhaps the newfangled distributions don't bother installing the HOWTOs, but I just checked and one of the HOWTOs is breastled "From DOS...
buttociated with this is the fact that the doc writers have too much knowledge of the entire Linux universe and can't bring themselves down to the level of the newbie. There are too many bits of knowledge that are buttumed.
A well-written set of documentation such as the following would go a long way toward making Linux more accessable:
Introduction to Linux: The most basic interaction between a user and the system such as files and simple file manipulation, directories and simple directory manipulation, changing files with vi (with a very minor subset of commands). Logging in and out, user-level pbuttword manipulation. Explanation of "regular expressions."
On my system (Mandrake 10.1) 'man cd' returns just the first part of what you show below. To see more, I'd have to do 'man bash' then find the part of the...
User's Guide: How to do basic tasks. The first chapter would go over the topics introduced in the Introduction, the rest would introduce and explain a simple task such as compiling and running "hello, world."
Reference Guide: What we see all too much of; an in-depth manual covering a whole bunch of stuff, with various bits of knowledge taken for granted.
Just my two zorkmids' worth.
-- -- Marten Kemp