In regards to the comments about IBM assembler manuals:
The biggest issue for me is that NONE of their manuals in pdf or tso datasets
have any easy connectivity. I am sorry, but I don't know the answer to the
following question:
Do I look it up in POOP or in Language Reference?
AND that is crucial to know. NOT knowing where to look I always have to look
through x number of manuals. And by-the-way, it might not even be in an
Assembler manual. It might be in a totally unrelated manual. So THEN, I have
to go look through ALL IBM manuals on the face of the planet. PLEASE. That's
just wrong and it wastes your valuable time. You know how I avoid that? I
keep everything I want to know, regardless of what it's about in ONE flat file
on the mainframe. I keep a consistent naming convention for each 'how to'
entry and so GENERALLY I know how to find the info I'm looking for. Table of
contents? It's nice, but my next question would be then, 'which chapter do I
look in?'. I don't know which chapter something is in sometimes(or most of the
time), so here we go again. Looking through all of the TOC entries in this
book, then this one, then this one... Again, that's not good. Yes, some of
you know how and where to
look. I don't, and I never have in IBM manuals. And yet, with the way I keep
notes, I can ALWAYS find what I need. More importantly, for anybody except
experts, it's a technique which would be best for EVERYONE(unless you have a
preferrence to take longer finding something). So, my goal would be to get IBM
to implement one file for anything which has an Assembler related datum in it.
Then provide a simple, non-techie-cized search algorithm to find things. Keep
it up-to-date everytime there is any new procedure, instruction, or problem
found with an Assembler instruction or a procedure implemented in Assembler.
BTW, yes I know about IBMIN. It's ok for looking for some things, but it has
significant irrelevancy in what searches done on it finds.
