Over at Linux Planet my favorite Linux newbie Emery Fletcher writes:
“I’d like to put in my two cents’ worth on the matter of documentation. I’m not an expert like Carla Schroder or Bruce Byfield, the two who brought up the topic, but I’m the very sort of person who needs it most, still pretty much of a newbie, but one who learns best by reading. It’s a good thing reading is my preferred mode of learning, because as it happens I’ve not personally met a real live human who is a Linux expert, one who could give me over-the-shoulder instructions as I muddle through.
It occurs to me that there must be a whole lot of people out in the real world who are not unlike me. They have used their PCs long enough that they’re familiar with all the processes they usually use, but they suspect there’s a lot more stuff they could do if only they knew how. After a few tentative experiments with what they’ve been using, they learn that the motto of Windows is You Can’t Get There From Here.
Books!
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…”
Read the rest of Emery’s excellent article at LinuxPlanet.