Agree.
Books would be a lot easier than websites…references to books do not need to be updated.
I think articles, rather than whole websites… good articles are rare… good specific websites are almost nonexistant
There are websites that are massive collections… like the encyclopedia section in a library. We can avoid these or make a specisl category.
You mean good documents about Latex… not documents written in Latex. The Leslie Lamport book is the bible on Latex
Basic documentation is pretty poor for commercial software too.
Find me a doc anywhere that fully explains the editing behavior of Microsoft Word when Track Changes is enabled. Why does Backspace sometimes have no effect, until I move the cursor by 1 position? It’s been true for 10+ years. (See some wrong explanations.)
Could I venture an opinion that BSD has better basic documentation than Linux.
For example the FreeBSD Handbook that comes with a BSD install is superior to anything Linux offers. The closest would be the online Arch and Gentoo documents.
That is for kernel and basic CLI issues.
The next level, utilities, used to be best documented in Unix , by the O’Reilly series.
The higher level, ie GUI , stuff, is supposed to be self documenting. That is the whole point of a GUI… it is supposed to provide a means of using the computer without having to read the manual. In general it is at least partly successful… lots of people use stuff like firefox without ever opening a book or a help document.
So to say OSS is weak on documention need qualification.
On the kernel, BSD is a winner, on utilities there are books, on GUI apps they are supposed to be able to be used without help docs.
We have not quite reached document free computing yet, but they are working on it.
To add +2 cents, the list could be based in a special order of evolution, I mean from the scratch to some level … it for example: server configuration, GUI tools, terminal tools such as Micro, terminal editors … etc … many branches to cover … I consider this post valuable as gold.
BTW the advantage to write/read tutorials through the web - such as itsfoss - is that can be updated/fixed anytime … something that does not happen with a book - mandatory to wait a new edition. Anyway for other topic such as programming I always use both approaches.
That is a good point.
Documentation needs to be as dynamic as the software it refers to. Modern software evolves rapidly… that is why being self documenting is an important goal, even if rarely completely achieved.
Hi Daniel,
Thank you and congrats on writing the Linux Pocket Guide. The LPG was one of my first Linux books and it’s been 19 years since you published it? how time passes.
Unfortunately I don’t have it anymore, but your post brought back old times and I’ll have to buy it again, on paper of course, because I can’t get used to books in digital format.
Hi @xahodo,
In my opinion, your suggestion is a very difficult topic to implement, but if everyone contributes, and if the moderators are willing to do so, we can create a list with the information that each of us provides.
I’ll look through my notes to see what I can contribute to that list.
Note: Although the Humble Bundle is outside the context of this list, it usually has books at affordable prices.
Valuable the list shared… huge thanks Jorge (@Tech_JA) … and I didn’t realize about Daniel (@dbauthor) is an author. Congrats about your work at Oreilly! …
I remember mostly LinuxCommand.org/ very valuable to learn from the scratch with solid basis.
Jorge (@Tech_JA ) brought to my attention that the site https://explainshell.com/ might be of interest to some users. He kindly suggested I should post in in this thread.
For many commands it is a convenient way of getting all the relevant information as to what the command and its parameters do.
It´s based on the man pages of the commands.
Just punch in the command and its parameters on the site and you´ll immediately get the explanation of it all.
This site contains 29761 parsed manpages from sections 1 and 8 found in Ubuntu’s manpage repository.
A lot of heuristics were used to extract the arguments of each program, and there are errors here and there, especially in manpages that have a non-standard layout.
[…]
Here´s an example provided by @nevj (from another thread) :
The collection includes approx. 5000 manual pages, more than 22 basic categories and a number of general tips for terminals.
The respective app works 100% offline, does not require an Internet connection and has no tracking software.
You can also retrieve a cheat sheet with practical commands.
