Re^3: Perl documentation documentation

Actually, tongue and cheek aside, I think this is a much needed piece of work. I usually refer to the Camel or LLama when I have a question because I find perldoc a little too counterintuitive for quick reference. I know others don't have a problem with perdoc but many a time I've heard newbies (and a few old salts) express frustration at not being able to get at the answer they just knew was in the documentation. It's not that they didn't know to look, they just didn't know how to look.

I know this was partly in fun but maybe make it a little less flip (the newbie reading over my shoulder thought it was a little patronizing) and you may have hit on something valuable.

PJ
use strict; use warnings; use diagnostics;

Comment on Re^3: Perl documentation documentation

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Re^4: Perl documentation documentation by bwelch (Curate) on Nov 17, 2004 at 16:02 UTC
Seconded! I believe this could be valuable to many people. One might consider expanding it a bit to show easy ways to look up different things. Examples of searching for syntax questions, cookbook methods, algorithms, and common modules might be just what people want in some cases.	[reply]
Re^4: Perl documentation documentation by Ytrew (Pilgrim) on Nov 18, 2004 at 05:29 UTC
I think it's actually a reasonable piece of documentation; it contains at least one piece of information that I didn't know for several years after using perl. Specifically, it took me about three years before I realized that the perldoc command had the "-f" switch. When I first started learning perl, I usually wanted to read the entire manual page, anyway. To my mind (and perhaps in the earlier versions of perldoc, I don't remember now), "perldoc" <topic> and "man" <topic> were essentially equivalent. It wasn't until I moved to the ActiveState release of perl (with no man pages under Windows), that I realized how useful "perldoc -f" was. So I'd support the notion of "meta-documentation" for that reason alone. Additionally, online documentation written for different intended audience than the traditional CS student with a background in C and UNIX might be helpful as well. -- Ytrew	[reply]


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