Message-ID: <20030624070523.3482.qmail@celery.tssi.com>
From: nolan@celery.tssi.com
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Documentation quality WAS: interesting PHP/MySQL thread
To: josh@agliodbs.com (Josh Berkus)
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 02:05:23 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org (\"'Advocacy PostgreSQL'\"),
	pgsql-general@postgresql.org ('PostgreSQL-general')
In-Reply-To: <200306232304.04070.josh@agliodbs.com> from "Josh Berkus" at Jun
	23, 2003 11:04:04 PM
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> ??? You can look at an HTML file directy with any browser.  If you're SSH-ing 
> in to a remote system, use Lynx.  Though I agree that providing both man and 
> html would be nicer.

Try accessing a HTML file on a Linux system from a PC-based browser.  

Unless you have some kind of file sharing software running, which I 
generally don't because the only times I've ever been hacked into they 
got in through file sharing ports, you can't get there from here.
 
> O'Reilly seems to be pretty hit-and-miss on this account.  The Perl books are 
> well-indexed, but "SQL in a Nutshell" has *no* index, perhaps because 
> O'Reilly thought (wrongly) that it didn't need one because of the 
> dictionary-like format.  The O'Reilly label is not a guarentee of quality, 
> just a general indicator.

I think the 'Nutshell' books are a different breed of cat, none of them
have ever had indexes worth mentioning.

> Authors seldom do the indexes themselves, as indexing is a black art known to 
> few (and I have yet to see a really good index prepared by the author -- 

I've been somewhat involved in three book projects (two textbooks and
one rule book), in all three case the authors did their own index.  Maybe
I've just had a good run of luck on the O'Reilly books I've bought, or maybe
I haven't bought as many of them in the last three or four years as I used
to.  
--
Mike Nolan