It's hard for me to believe that trees are intentionally being destroyed so reference manuals can be printed. Have you not heard of Adobe reader or BookManager? These tools make looking up information so much easier and quicker over looking in a printed book that I can't understand why anyone would ever need a printed reference book. With sophisticated search engines, the "size" of the book no longer matters.
John Bodoh -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gerhard Postpischil Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 3:29 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Is the PoOP too big? (was Assembler manuals) On 8/23/2011 2:14 PM, Bernd Oppolzer wrote: > I believe that the PoOP should or could stay like it is, because > the normal > use is not as a tutorial for learning ASSEMBLER or machine > architecture, > but to make clear some difficulties or peculiarities of seldom used > instructions, > at least in my case. The printed manual is getting to be unwieldy. I could see having it split into two, or possibly three, volumes: the basic hardware design and features, the privileged instructions, and the unprivileged (and semi-privileged) one, with Appendix A split (and expanded) accordingly. The digital version is just fine, except for the skimpy Appendix A. The major nit I have to pick is with the operand description. After more than forty years of use, I still manage to mistake R1 for GPR1, etc., and have to make a conscious effort to read it correctly. Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, VT
