Charles Mills wrote:
You're certainly right, and I'm not an IBM-basher. I think it's a great
organization (not without flaws -- no large organization is without large
flaws) but a great organization, and the IBM mainframe has provided a
rewarding (in several senses of the word) living for me, and I am grateful.
The problem with much computer documentation, including much of z/OS's, is
that it is feature- rather than task-oriented. That is, the documentation
does a perfect job of answering the question "so, what does the IEABRC macro
do and how do you code it?" and a terrible job of answering the question
"so, you're facing base register constraint, what do you do?" and "okay, you
converted your open code to use jump instructions but you are now getting
errors on the system macros, what do you do?" Unfortunately, a real-life
user is much more likely to be asking the latter questions. Not a single
reference to IEABRC appears in any of the Guide manuals. So you have to know
that you need IEABRC to know that IEABRC is the solution. That was my point
in the text that you quoted.
Another problem, frankly, with the z/OS documentation is the fragmentation.
The fragmentation of the documentation -- what is in MVS, what is in JES2/3,
what is in DFSMS? -- only makes sense if you already know the answer to the
question "does what I want to accomplish have an MVS solution or a JES
solution or a DFSMS solution?" Explain to me how anyone who didn't already
know would guess that the function to copy a dataset would not be a base
part of the operating system (i.e., a part of MVS rather than an "add-on"
product, DFSMS)? How would you guess that OPEN would be DFSMS but DYNALLOC
would be MVS?
Ah hah! This is where training can help a lot. Those of us who
write training materials organize the content exactly that way,
around tasks to be performed; and usually in a natural progression
of tasks: let's do this; that allows us to do this; and so on.
For example, I've spent five weeks so far in writing a one day course.
I've pulled together content from many sources (IBM docs, my own
courses, IETF RFCs, and so on) to provide what I consider to be a
natural flow of more and more complex tasks. I still have a couple
of weeks more, probably. And in the end, students will take this
one day course and not even be aware of the time and care it took
to build this. It will all seem easy and natural to them.
If you don't take the training you're going to be floundering
around to get the tasks done, and they won't seem at all natural
nor connected. And you'll have to re-learn some of the tasks
later when you have to do something somewhat similar to the
task you just finished. Let's talk productivity and effectiveness.
And that's why we get paid the big bucks. [I wish.]
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
303-393-8716
http://www.trainersfriend.com
-- to be included in our opt-in list of announcements of
-- new courses and other products and services from The
-- Trainer's Friend, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
