Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 04:13:40 +0000 From: mark@linus.demon.co.uk (Mark Valentine) To: kelly@fsl.noaa.gov (Sean Kelly), akyol@wireless.Stanford.EDU Cc: doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: What printed documentation do we need? Message-ID: <199601240413.EAA16457@linus.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: Sean Kelly's message of Jan 23, 1:37pm
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> 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.
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