Coreolyn sits lotus style and allows the stress to pass through him

Oommmmmm
Oommmmmm
I hate man pages, Oommmmm
I hate perldoc, Ommmmm
but I'm glad perldocs exist, Ommmmmm
I exist to keep O,Rielly, Corolis, and Sam's in business, Ohmmmmmm

Seriously. I find that man pages and perldoc entries obtuse and difficult to grep. This is a personal choice and an expensive one. In the last year and a half I've spent close to $1000 on IT books and I've gone from knowing absolutely nothing about perl to being wonderfully bored at Tom Christiansen's advanced perl session at Perl Conf v4.

(Damiens OO session was still downright awe-inspiring. -Oommmmmmm.)

Anyhowser's. Whether it's here or on a mailing list, whenever anyone looks for more info I'll point them to the right book. Sometimes even to the chapter and page that I think provides the best clarification of the problem they are looking for. Maybe when I use a book index I'm just like my old man solving math problems on his sliderule when calculators were available, but lets face it perldocs were not written with publishing editor's reviewing the entries. While they may get the essential's across to the expirienced perl programmer they naturally lack in content for the inexpirienced.

I cringe whenever I see a post to an obvious newbie that chastises them with RTFM's and a perlsyn or perldoc reference. Just using perldoc for a fine grained search is obtuse enough, but even when one is successful the entries sometimes qualify for the Obfuscated Perl Contest.

Personaly I think in the Perl world RTFM should be changed to OTFM (Own the f'n manual).

Coreolyn changes into a flame retardant robe and takes his meditation out of the node.

Oommmmmm
Oommmmmm
I hate Andy Rooney
Oommmmmm.

coreolyn Duct tape devotee.

In reply to Perldoc's vrs. Books, and RTFM's by coreolyn

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.