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…””

Complete
Story