Message-ID: <20030624050732.2523.qmail@celery.tssi.com>
From: nolan@celery.tssi.com
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] interesting PHP/MySQL thread
To: gearond@cvc.net (Dennis Gearon)
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 00:07:32 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: scrappy@postgresql.org (The Hermit Hacker),
	cobalt@bearfruit.org (Matthew Nuzum),
	pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org (\"'Advocacy PostgreSQL'\"),
	pgsql-general@postgresql.org ('PostgreSQL-general')
In-Reply-To: <3EF7D23C.9040900@cvc.net> from "Dennis Gearon" at Jun 23,
	2003 09:23:24 PM
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

>     the new manuals seems to be drifting to using only GOOGLE listings. 
> MUCH less information on one page, not nearly as good search results as 
> the old one. I don't know why they are switching.

I think I must be old-fashioned, or perhaps just getting old, I think 
online manuals are moving in the direction of becoming much harder for 
me to use.  (I have yet to master the 'info' format that Linux has
gone to, for example.)

And my pet peeve of the month is software source distributions that 
include the documentation ONLY in HTML, which is OK IF you have Apache 
running on the system you're building the sources on and are willing to 
make the documentation directory available to Apache, but otherwise 
they're very hard to use.  

And while i'm on the subject, the only book (hard copy) I've got on 
PostgreSQL is the O'Reilly 'Practical PostgreSQL' book, now a bit dated,
which has one of the worst indexes I've seen in a computer manual in years.  
It may be the worst index I've ever experienced in an O'Reilly book.

(Sorry if Worsley or Drake are reading this, but that's my opinion.)

The O'Reilly Reese/Yarger/King/Williams MySQL book has a much more 
comprehensive index, 23 pages compared to 7 for Worsley/Drake.  I know
that indexes are the last thing authors want to do (both literally and 
figuratively), but a good index makes the rest of the book much better.

I've had a series of paper clips, bulldog clips and post-it notes marking 
the sections I tend to reuse frequently, because the index doesn't get 
you there.  Most of the time I use the online manual, and I've got a
few pages that aren't obvious from the table of contents bookmarked for
the online manual, too.
--
Mike Nolan