Bitching about the documentation...

[gene tani]

skip at pobox.com wrote:
> >> Are you telling us you learned C#, smalltalk, lisp, C, perl,
>     >> whatever, from 1 website only, without looking at any books, without
>     >> spending any money on IDEs or any software?  Cause that's what you're
>     >> asking here.
>
>     rurpy> For perl and C, yes, that's (close to) what I'm telling you.
>     rurpy> Perl I learned exclusively from the man pages, before WWW.  I
>     rurpy> used it for 10 years before I ever bought a printed book.  C I
>     rurpy> learned exclusively from the K&R book.
>
> That's about the same for me, except Perl never "stuck".
>
>     rurpy> I tried to learn Python from the "official" docs but found it
>     rurpy> impossible.
>
> I did as well, though the docs as they existed in 1993 or so (that is
> pre-Lutz, pre-Beasley).
>
>
>     rurpy> I bought Beasley's book (I think this may have predated
>     rurpy> Martelli's book but I don't remember) which I thought quite good
>     rurpy> and which I still turn to before the Python docs in most cases.
>
> Like other free software, you can choose to figure things out yourself (use
> the source Luke) or pay someone to help you out.  I'm not using this as an
> excuse for poor Python docs.
>
>     rurpy> That's a very good list and I will save a copy, thanks.  But what
>     rurpy> does it have to do with Python's documentation?
>
> I'm sure you could find similar lists for Perl, C, Ruby, Tcl, Java, C++, C#,
> etc.  Does that mean their documentation stinks?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  It
> just means a lot of people have somewhat different ways of tackling the same
> problem.
>
> Skip

Skip: good points

orig qvetcher: Well, I won't have time til, maybe early 2007 to debate
the meaning of "free software","official docs", is buying K&R buying a
book?  In the meantime, use the resources, Luke (i think i've been on
usenet too long... signing out)