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by digler999
3465 days ago
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I back you up on this. I'm about 10 years in my career, and I use SO more and more. Because, conceptually, I know what I want to do. Last night it was trying to use the asyncio library for Python 3 to use sockets. I know what I wanted to do: async, accept, listen, read and write to sockets. But how, _specifically_, do you do that with python 3 ? Don't know and dont care. Ask SO or find someone's blog howto and be done with it. For better or worse, I dont use books at all anymore. What I find is that they take the long way to go about things. The more I learn, the more I just want to see EXAMPLES. I dont even want to read a single word "about" topic X, I just want to see topic X in use. I'm about ready to write my own manifesto about why man pages are worthless. When I do, I'm going to blog it and submit it here. I don't even know where to start about man pages. They are reference material, but totally useless at showing you how to use the tool. even though they tell you what EVERY dash-this and dash-that option means, you can STILL screw up by not ordering them properly, forgetting a required dash-this, or not formatting the arg properly (information that is either omitted completely or buried in thousands of words inside the man page, but could be explained concisely with one simple example). the corollary is also true: examples are so effective (in my opinion) that they could go ahead and omit the "dash-this and dash-that" from the man page, and I could likely infer what those options mean just by seeing the example, or an example with a one sentence comment saying "recursively scan directories" (and I see -r). the letters often don't correlate to an actionable-thing that the tool does, the man pages don't cover the most common, useful way that tool will be used, giving equal weight (or rather, equal ambiguity) to arcane, never-used options. They take 100 words to explain what a 10-word example could show. I honestly don't recall the last time I read a man page and actually found what I needed. |
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