From owner-freebsd-doc Tue Jan 23 20:19:53 1996 Return-Path: owner-doc Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id UAA18262 for doc-outgoing; Tue, 23 Jan 1996 20:19:53 -0800 (PST) Received: from linus.demon.co.uk (linus.demon.co.uk [158.152.10.220]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id UAA18113 for ; Tue, 23 Jan 1996 20:19:13 -0800 (PST) Received: (from mark@localhost) by linus.demon.co.uk (8.7.3/8.7.3) id EAA16457; Wed, 24 Jan 1996 04:13:41 GMT Message-Id: <199601240413.EAA16457@linus.demon.co.uk> From: mark@linus.demon.co.uk (Mark Valentine) Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 04:13:40 +0000 In-Reply-To: Sean Kelly's message of Jan 23, 1:37pm X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.6 alpha(3) 7/19/95) To: kelly@fsl.noaa.gov (Sean Kelly), akyol@wireless.Stanford.EDU Subject: Re: What printed documentation do we need? Cc: doc@FreeBSD.org Sender: owner-doc@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > From: kelly@fsl.noaa.gov (Sean Kelly) > Date: Tue 23 Jan, 1996 > Subject: Re: What printed documentation do we need? > A lot of people think it's nice to have all the man pages printed > nicely and bound together. I'd be one of them if I had money up the > wazoo, which I don't. > > However, I do recommend at least one of the books from the series: > > 4.4BSD System Manager's Manual > > and if you're feeling particularly rich, then get these other two: > > 4.4BSD User's Supplementary Documents > 4.4BSD Programmer's Supplementary Documents > > You'll find a lot more papers/articles than man pages in these. Seconded. These are precisely the three I returned home from the bookshop with yesterday. I find that I'm more likely to read the bound versions than try to browse via a ghostview window on an undersized monitor, and finally having my own copy of all those Bell Labs papers is wonderful! These books give me a chance to put my feet up and re-discover a lot of what I've missed out on or forgotten over the years, and give me a deeper understanding of the way 4.4BSD was intended to be. There's a definite benefit from just going through the manuals sequentially at least once every few years, and it's way too long since I did that. I'll probably pick up the URM and PRM soon too, partly to make that easier, and partly as a reference to help differentiate the value added parts of FreeBSD (that knowledge is useful for software portability, to know which facilities you can expect across a selection of 4.4BSD-derived systems, and so on). Mark.