Personally I blame this (the growing number of basic questions) to a considerable part on the fact that physical books have mostly disappeared. Boy how I loved skimming through these books back when I made my first steps in the mainframe world. Shelves full of interesting reading material. There's quite a number of reference manuals that I literally read end-to-end. [*1] When someone told me to RTFM (in fact it wasn't even necessary 'cause when I felt I need some information I just walked to the library, grabbed the relevant books and started reading). There are more aspects that I miss when comparing electronic to physical books. Things like remembering a syntax diagram's location as some two thirds deep in a manual on the lower portion of a left side. Or piling books one atop the other, all filled with notes and opened at relevant pages ... and leaving them that way when leaving the office.
Nowadays as I'm doing remote 'consulting' (though I hate the term) I find myself again and again confronted with non-IBM software whose documentation is sometimes hard to get at. Or IBM manuals whose title I forgot or whose title got changed. In the good old days I got on my feet, let my eyes wander over all those fascinating titles (thereby constantly updating my own memory), grabbed ... we already had that. Now I'm addressing my contacts at the customer site and get close to nothing in a timely manner. Next I contact the vendor and the answer is: nope, sorry, you must have a customer id to use our web pages (not all vendors but a considerable number of them). In my experience it was and still is often easier to take a set of books belonging to a topic and have a quick look into the index/contents pages of each one than to find the correct buzzwords to be inserted into some web page's 'search' field. And I do admit having asked questions lately on IBM-MAIN or similar groups that I'd never have asked had the books been within my immediate reach. One aspect. One that annoys me every now and then. Robert [*1] And I loved to insert the update pages into the manuals. That way I touched most every manual in our library and that way I learned new and updated features on the fly. > -----Ursprungliche Nachricht----- > Von: IBM Mainframe Discussion List > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Auftrag von Tim Hare > Gesendet: Freitag, 1. Juni 2007 16:45 > An: [email protected] > Betreff: Re: Questions to the list > > > Is it me, or are we getting a lot of questions lately > along the line of: > > "I've never done anything on a mainframe before, how > do I do 'X'"? (for many values of 'X') > > I've received a lot of help from this list, definitely, but > when I first signed up it was more along the lines of systems > programmer-related technical items, now it seems there are a > lot more questions that should be solved via RTFM. > > The one which triggered this question was the question > about Easytrieve, but it was just one in a series of them > lately that got me wondering. No offense to the posters of the > questions, please, it's just something I've noticed, and which > seemed appropriate for a Friday question. > > Tim Hare > Senior Systems Programmer > Florida Department of Transportation > (850) 414-4209 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
