This. Reference and User's Guide are different documents, or at least should be. The User's Guide is usually much larger than the Reference, I think/hope.
The Reference is just that: the WHAT. The User's Guide is just that: the HOW. This used to be canon, and has been lost. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Colin Paice Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2025 3:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Newer SYSPROGs (was Re: Political topics) I worked on a large IBM product. We had an API reference and a user's guide. The reference was all the APIs and options. The user's guide gave examples - and softcopy links to the topics in the reference. We also had a command reference, and a planning guide which gave pre-reqs, and examples of typical configurations - including the commands needed to create them. In effect, it was a command user's guide. We also had a "messages and codes" manual. They have now all been merged into one big set of html pages - which I sometimes find impossible to use, for example searching for a topic, now produces thousands of hits. Searching within one "book" would give few hits. I've used tools like pdftk <https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-to>to extract sections from the IBM TCPIP books ( eg for Pagent) and extract just the pages I needed. I also use these subset pdf files. For example searching for "port" in the TCPIP books finds thousands of hits. Searching for port in the extracted sections gave fewer, more relevant hits. I created my own pdf from chapters in various pdf manuals. For example the TCPIP netstat command. the z/OS operator commands I used (but could not remember the syntax), some MQ commands, and a few DB2 commands. I printed it and had it spiral bound. I think it was about 50 pages. You can then put the little tabs on the pages -- green = TCPIP yellow = MQ to help you locate the pages. I also have a "useful.txt" file on Linux, and use it to store information ( in one line per item) for commands I use, but the fingers do not remember. I just used *grep pdf useful.txt* and it just gave *pdftk ~/apdf/TCP/IP_reference24.pdf cat 930-946 output tls.pdf* With a little work you can avoid printing reams of output. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
