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The other thing that is worth saying is that TFM of RTFM fame is usually really quite good, but also really quite large. I read all of nmap's documentation as a teenager and learnt a lot about networking. I'm sure 99% of the time all I need is -sS -O, and sometimes -P, but I'm very happy with the knowledge/time rato. It's a wonderful, huge tool and I know that if I need to use a bit more functionality I can do do. A lot of the shitty guides do the equivalent of saying "nmap? Just run sudo nmap -sS HOSTNAME to do a port scan!", but spread out across ten pages of SEO crap. It's not exactly wrong, but it's not exactly helpful either. The trouble is, of course, that now if you Google "how to do a port scan Linux" you get that guide, rather than the manual that explains in detail why it's a hard problem and a bunch of ways and subtleties about doing it. Fast forward ten years and anything other than -sS looks weird. Samba is the same, but somehow, infinitely more complex in detail and, because the tools have different names, less searchable. Want to mount and active directory share? You probably need kinit and to know the word "Kerberos". Browse other shares? Smbtree. Make them persistent together and mount on boot? That's another silly, overly detailed guide. And each one of these guides comes with its own lack of detailed understanding by the authors, focus on ads and SEO, and further obscures the fact that the original FM covers all of this in detail, but it's long and complicated, because, well, it's complicated! I personally think that open source projects would do well to maintain a cookbook FAQ of "here is a set of common usages of this tool". Many man pages do, with one liners, but anything more complex tends to be hidden. It would be great if those who understand the complex subtleties involved write a definitive way to do things, rather than expecting everyone to read all of TFM all the time -- and I equally realise that, as someone who makes complex software to do complex things, half the time you really would rather your users RTFM you spent so long writing at any rate... |