On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 09:50:59AM +0600, markel wrote:
...
> 
> I'm worried about not being able to understand the man pages 
> 

Other people have answered a bunch of stuff, but I'm going to touch on
this one:

When I first started using a UNIXlike operating system, the
documentation was much smaller but even more technical.  (Don't ask
when that was, some people on this list weren't alive then.  :-)  The
hard part, for me, was learning the basics of the system's
expectations.  Once I understood stuff like standard in versus
standard out, redirection, pipes, etc, it all started to fit together.

Each man page is somewhat like a piece of a puzzle; it gives you good
detail about a particular small piece of the picture, but parts of the
picture go off the edges of that piece onto other pieces.  To learn
the OS, you have to put the puzzle together.  Knowing something about
the "big picture" helps a lot.

A good introductory UNIX book can give you the "big picture, and let
you understand the man pages far better.  If you can't get one for
whatever reason, you'll find several good introductory tutorials on
the Net.

Good luck!

==ml

-- 
Michael Lucas		mwlucas@FreeBSD.org, mwlucas@BlackHelicopters.org
   "I'm sorry, but 'Social Darwinism' is no excuse for killing all of 
	           your co-workers."  -- Ivan Brunetti
		http://www.BlackHelicopters.org/~mwlucas/