Not to take away how important reading these things are but I hate how people with a functional memory have no idea what life is like for people with poor memory. I would forget everything I read the minute button mashed the keyboard to quit the manual. It’s like when trying to imagine what is like living as one of those people without an inner voice. It’s such a foreign idea that its a shock when you realize some people don’t have one
Bro’s not saying you have to memorize the manual, just like … read it. Even a bit of familiarity goes a long way.
If you have literally no memory then command line is 100% unusable but otherwise every little bit helps.
No memory is me being hyperbolic but it’s severely limited. So I feel like reading a manual line by line means I get much less out of it but it’s a large amount of time invested. So I have to factor in that my retention vs time on task is pretty skewed. It’s frustrating. I need to do something a few times to learn. Learning by reading is not great for me. But tech is a very document heavy industry
I don’t know if you mean you don’t remember the gist even, but it’s more about learning about what’s possible with what so you can look up specifics when you need them than remembering the contents wholesale
This is great perspective and advice. It’s how I learn too. I always felt like a poor performer because in my life I haven’t been able to recall specifics after learning something when I compared to others. I’ve got a complex. But general what you describe is how I recall. Almost in chunks but not specifics.
The latest manuals I’ve read were from shitty Chinese manufacturers who didn’t even proofread what they wrote. They were asked to put foreign letters on a page and that’s what they did.
This is the next level of learning. Not only do you read how it is, you have to deduct, to assess and explore. Writing your own documentation is the best way to learn after all.
Unironically my advice to people asking how to get started programming (at a c++ shop) included going through everything on cppreference.com and using every function in a playground at least once.
Isn’t that like telling someone to write every word down? And as such does not really help understand things? It trains how to type the syntax.
If it wasn’t clear, I meant to do something with each function in some test code and understand it… Not just type it in…
When learning a new human language, it’s good practice to also learn sentences and practice speaking and writing, not just rote vocabulary memorization.
When learning a new human language, it’s good practice to also learn sentences and practice speaking and writing, not just rote vocabulary memorization.
At work people think I’m some kind of wizard with git.
I tell them I’ve been using it every day for 15 years and I read the freely available book on the website, link them to it, and mention the first 3 chapters probably covers 90% of their normal usage so they should just read that.
They won’t do it. I don’t get it. Something about written words is scary to them.
Same here. I obviously don’t remember everything because I rarely if ever have to use them, but at least when the time finally comes that I need “git bisect”, I’ll know that “git bisect” exists and I’ll be able to go straight to the manual page that documents it.
No one expects anyone to read the manual and remember it all… But you will naturally remember the big lines and be able to refer to the right place when you need something.
This is my exact experience with a lot of things. I just skimmed through the first party documentation for $thing and it pays huge dividends over time when compared to trying to learn from the relatively context-sparse stack overflow or chatbot
Unfortunately, the manual on goods these days is roughly the size of a post-it note. And even if they have proper ones, none of them have the full technical readouts, blueprints and repair guides that they used to back in the day.
I got started programming by reading the manual of my TI calculator during a boring history class. It really does work.
Have you seen the manuals today? 90% of the content for a product manual is CYA. In the next year or so they will all be written by AI.
Also, different people have different learning styles. A manual is just one. Many of us learn better by having something real to do, and learning by doing.
ls /usr/sbin/ if you’re hardcore.
If you are hardcore, your distro puts /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin in all in the same directory.
I don’t use Arch, BTW.
Cool. I used to but mostly Chimera Linux these days.
That said, I probably have more instances of Debian running than anything else if you count VMs and containers.
The distro matters less than it used to now that we have Flatpak and Distrobox.
Yes, I of course read the docs. Yes, I didn’t fuck it up first and then went back to do double work because I was being lazy and wanted the quick dopamine hit of seeing something on the screen. That wouldn’t be me!
Linux version of a cold plunge.
Does someone have the tldr?
/s
Einstein reportedly said “Never memorize something you can look up in a book”. When asked the speed of sound he said , “I do not know but that number is commonly found in textbooks”.
I am not going to spend my life reading manuals. Reading my furnace manual years before a problem arises is unlikely to help me.
However, I completely agree that RTFM is a great thing to do with confronted with a gap in knowledge or problem to be solved. Not the whole manual probably, just the relevant parts.
I think it is much more important to store ideas in your head than information. That said, those ideas do not come from nothing.
I might not read the man pages of every command on a Linux system. At least, not all of them. But I should know high-level what commands are available and what they generally do. That allows me to think of them when they would be useful. But I probably have no idea what the proper syntax is for any of them when I go to use them.
And “the manual” is not always the best place to get ideas, even if it is the authoritative source for specific knowledge.
Time spent reading the manual is time not spent doing something else. Spend your time learning. Spend most of it learning what is possible. In my view, that is the best strategy.
Yeah, but where is the manual to read the fucking manual ?
you talking about school?
Yeah, that shit that bore you to death. Who needs it anyway? Ignorance is strength.
right?
/s
Manuel had it last.
RTFM FTW
Hahaha. Most here making excuses why they don’t read manuals.
