How to read and understand manuals and documentations?
Posted by Repulsive_Cap_9375@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 5 comments
Hi guys,
Im 39, coming from the translation and agriculture fields (i know, quite random:), and recently signed up for a coding course, or more precisely: For a bootcamp that hopefully will lead into a course.
I put immense hours daily, sitting in the library solving various challenges (in C), learning shell scripting, git, github...You know the drill.
But here's where im getting confused: How do you guys manage to understand manuals and documentation. Of course, some documentation are much more readable and easier to understand than others, but some (like command line manuals) looks so archaic to me and hard to understand that i dont even know how to build the actual command.
Of course i have the basic control in the command line, but when it comes to specific tasks (i.e, build a command that find all the files that ends with \~ or *, then delete it - all in the same command, no && etc), i dont even know how to search, where to search how to concatenate it etc.
How do you guys (especially the old school programmers) found an answer to peculiar questions back then (prior to AI)? is there a way to search manuals and documentation that i dont get?
Shed some light, and help a brother improve!
Thanks:)
randomjapaneselearn@reddit
yes, you are correct https://xkcd.com/1168/ linux command help is usually horrible, instead of typyng
command --helporman commandyou can take a look at this that is written in an easier way: https://tldr.sh/personally i think that if you need to do this kind of "complex task" there are better options like using a python script https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/
kbielefe@reddit
Often you have to backfill your knowledge in order to understand documentation. If you don't understand a concept, you have to find a way to learn that concept, then come back to what you're trying to do. Learning that concept might require learning even more concepts first. You can get several levels deep, especially when you're new.
Back in the day, figuring out your find and delete example would require starting out with an "intro to unix" book and hoping it covered the topics you needed. Sometimes you just had to give up on a problem, then a year later you'd stumble across some background context and it would suddenly click.
Nowadays, we have LLMs to answer all our dumb questions, and you can keep pestering them with follow up questions about the parts you don't understand. They are great learning tools if you use them as such.
grantrules@reddit
For fun I screen recorded me solving your problem in a language I've never really touched before using only the official documentation.. unfortunately I didn't check it before I started recording and it got messed up due to my screen scaling, but aside from a few terminal commands you don't get to see, you can at least follow my thought process.
vicms91@reddit
I skimmed through manuals to get an idea of what was possible in that language and a general idea about how it worked. Then when I had a specific project I would go back and read in more detail. Also lots of experimentation and looking at existing code.
grantrules@reddit
Well I'd break it down into steps. How do you list files in a directory? I'd look for a file handling or IO section in the manual. How do you see if a string ends with a specific character? I'd look in the manual for a string section. I'll look through for a method that could help me.