Linux Documentation From A User's Viewpoint

"If you're an absolute newbie, there's really no lack of useful books that will help you along on the Freedom Train to get a Linux box set up with one of the transition distros like Ubuntu or Mepis or Mint, and before very long it becomes as familiar to you as Windows once was. But now and then something comes up, like creating the /home partition you find you should have set up during installation, and the instructions for it involve a good deal of copy-and-paste of scripts.

"That's where documentation gets dicey. Sure, you can do as instructed, but that's no different from “click on this, click on that”. It's an instruction, telling you HOW but not WHY. Real documentation should give something more, not necessarily a full account of every detail, but at least an overview of what processes are involved and how they operate. I remember lurking on user forums long before I ever attempted an installation, trying to get some background. I soon learned that there were just a few really helpful gurus who would put their instructions in the form “What you use is (command), and what that does is (operation) on the (target) to make it (result). The way you type that into the terminal is...""

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