[...] > I find the professional documentation for Solaris > fairly typical of > professional documentation these days, and not > terribly useful. It is, > as you say, detailed and step-by-step. What it > *doesn't* do is give me > any traction in really understanding how the system > works; which means I > have no way to choose among the alternative > approaches offered, for > example. It never seems to directly answer the > question I have at the time.
Well, mostly it seems to be either specification-oriented reference (i.e. man pages) or task guides. The _developer_ docs are better than that of course; at least some are. But on the system side, it seems to be mostly one or the other. Troubleshooting seems to be a weak point to me; whether that's due to a reluctance to acknowledge the need for it, or something else, I don't know. I can think of two approaches, and I think I'd like to have both. One would be almost a lightweight version of the Solaris Internals book; something that shows enough of how things work structured in a way likely to assist in realizing where they might _not_ be working. The other, I remember from IBM hardware techs many years ago. They had books of flowcharts stepping them through exactly what to test and what to do next, ending up with the replacement of some assembly. All one had to know was enough to follow the instructions and a 10 year old could probably have learned that if they had the attention span. The flowchart approach isn't applicable to every situation, but I think it's more flexible than the task guides, which strike me as avoiding decision nodes whenever possible. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
