perldoc howto?

Opinions on the usefulness of Perldoc restarted a train of thought I had earlier.

When Niederrhein.pm had our books - meeting not to long ago, perldoc was a topic, too. All of us seemed to have had the same problem in the beginning: struggling with the doc

For most of us, English only being our second language, there was more than one problem to overcome. First of all we had to understand a kind of English that is not taught at school, and then we had to figure out how to read the doc.

When I started out, I didn't have the best of books, and I simly didn't come to the doc where it says you can search perldoc for functions by typing perldoc -f function.

This is a problem many people have experienced, so we at Niederrhein.pm wondered, if there shouldn't be something like perldoc howto containing search options and typographical conventions and other hints towards reading the doc.

What do you think?

neophyte Niederrhein.pm

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Re: perldoc howto? by jepri (Parson) on Mar 26, 2001 at 20:00 UTC
The other possible option would be for bilingual perl coders like yourself and your .pm group to translate at least the core docs for others who aren't quite so good at English. Even that would be a large task, but spread amoung a few people it wouldn't be too bad. ____________________ Jeremy I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.	[reply]
Re (tilly) 1: perldoc howto? by tilly (Archbishop) on Mar 27, 2001 at 05:56 UTC
Try typing: `perldoc perldoc` [download] or even: `perldoc` [download] Also you can type a "/", then a pattern to look for, then "n" until you got to the right section. I learned that from an old hand at Unix who had just expected it to work like Unix man pages did. Well I hadn't known you could do that with man either...	[reply] [d/l] [select]
(arturo) Re: perldoc howto? by arturo (Vicar) on Mar 26, 2001 at 20:12 UTC
As an aside, there's a bit of the kind of information you seek (about typographical conventions, etc.) in the `perldoc perlpod` manpage. It's not a comprehensive guide to writing Perl documentation, but it does have some implicit style pointers and hints about conventions in it. On its own, it's certainly not everything you seek, though. And it's not going to get you over any language hurdles (tho' the person what wrote it, I understand, is some sort of linguist =) Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor	[reply] [d/l]


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