My first impression as well. You could take some IT grad and give them this handbook and then they would be dangerous, but not very effective.
Back in the day, when I was first exposed to Unix (on Sun3), one of the sysadmins pointed me to the 'man' feature. After a while I figured out that I could do a man -k - to get a list of all the man pages (because the summary for each page includes a '-'). So I did that and printed out the result (lp/lpr). At that time, the total number of man page entries fit on something like half a dozen pages. I spent a few days (part time) reading each one. It was a great way to learn.
My current Linux desktop (Mint) gives the following for man -k - | wc:
2943 26748 200002
That list would fit on 50 printed pages, which is about 10x what it was 37 years ago.
So if you have the patience to read almost 3k man pages, you too can become a Linux expert.
Ha, I never knew about man -k - until now, and I've been doing this for 20 years! Thanks for the tip! (whatis is also a synonym for man -f, and apropos a synonym for man -k, apparently)
Back in the day, when I was first exposed to Unix (on Sun3), one of the sysadmins pointed me to the 'man' feature. After a while I figured out that I could do a man -k - to get a list of all the man pages (because the summary for each page includes a '-'). So I did that and printed out the result (lp/lpr). At that time, the total number of man page entries fit on something like half a dozen pages. I spent a few days (part time) reading each one. It was a great way to learn.
My current Linux desktop (Mint) gives the following for man -k - | wc: 2943 26748 200002
That list would fit on 50 printed pages, which is about 10x what it was 37 years ago.
So if you have the patience to read almost 3k man pages, you too can become a Linux expert.