Re: [GENERAL] Documentation quality WAS: interesting PHP/MySQL thread

> ??? You can look at an HTML file directy with any browser. If you're SSH-ing
> in to a remote system, use Lynx. Though I agree that providing both man and
> html would be nicer.

Try accessing a HTML file on a Linux system from a PC-based browser.

Unless you have some kind of file sharing software running, which I
generally don't because the only times I've ever been hacked into they
got in through file sharing ports, you can't get there from here.

> O'Reilly seems to be pretty hit-and-miss on this account. The Perl books are
> well-indexed, but "SQL in a Nutshell" has *no* index, perhaps because
> O'Reilly thought (wrongly) that it didn't need one because of the
> dictionary-like format. The O'Reilly label is not a guarentee of quality,
> just a general indicator.

I think the 'Nutshell' books are a different breed of cat, none of them
have ever had indexes worth mentioning.

> Authors seldom do the indexes themselves, as indexing is a black art known to
> few (and I have yet to see a really good index prepared by the author --

I've been somewhat involved in three book projects (two textbooks and
one rule book), in all three case the authors did their own index. Maybe
I've just had a good run of luck on the O'Reilly books I've bought, or maybe
I haven't bought as many of them in the last three or four years as I used
to.
--
Mike Nolan