Re: Cost of printed books (was Re: Online Books)

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 10:17:34 -0000, "George Barbour" <gbarbour_at_csc.com> wrote:

>can teach you more than you ever need about Oracle, but boy, do they ramble. >The Oracle docset is one of the worst, and its incomplete.

I think we're on the right track here, thanks.

I'm not sure how that could be remedied without knowing some more details. If writers were asked to stop rambling, it might magnify any problems of incompleteness, and vice versa.

Is the rambling due to

• verbose, formal prose,
• stating the obvious,
• long examples where the key point only takes 2-3 lines of code,
• discussion of internals that the user can't do anything with,
• exhaustive discussion of possibilities that could be trimmed,
• passages meant to persuade rather than inform,

or other types of redundancy?

Is it incomplete because of

• not covering all possible uses of a feature,
• not listing all restrictions,
• not explaining how a feature works in combination with others,
• more examples needed,
• features not mentioned at all,
• discussion split across multiple books and so impossible to follow,
• lack of information about recent enhancements to a feature,
• relevant book exists but not part of the doc library,

or other ways that information could be missing?  

>These was, maybe there still is, a piece of software called Easyflow,
>written by HavenTree Software Ltd. The software was good and performed well.
>But the manual, the manual, certainly the 1989 version, which I still
>cherish, created a standard which has never been beaten.

You must read the IBM AIX XL Fortran/6000 Version 3 User's Guide. :-)

John

--
Got an Oracle database question?
Try the search engine for the database docs at:
http://tahiti.oracle.com/