On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 13:10, Todd Cary wrote:
> Bryan -
>
> Agreed! For me there is a distinction between "understanding" and
> "knowing". My 30 years experience has been in the Windows environment
> and in comparison, Linux is much easier to understand. The challenge
> is knowing where to look or knowing which function and switch to use.
I'd add to the challenge knowing which of the nearly-infinite ways
of doing something is going to work best, require the least effort,
and/or work the same across many distributions and versions...
'yum update' is an extreme example compared to any other way to
maintain a system. But it doesn't work that way everywhere and
even where it does you may want packages that aren't bundled in
any repositories so you have to know how and when to do things the
hard way.
> I often use the term "spiral learning"; that is one starts with a task
> to do. Rather than having to commit reems of information to memory to
> achieve a simple task, it is easier to accomplish the task by looking
> up what is wanted. Then one can expand (spiral outward) his
> knowledge. Now I have many friends who prefer to read manuals from
> cover to cover (and they remember most of it). Of course, my dyslexia
> creates it's own hurdle and bias.
There are certain core parts that help with all your other learning
like basic shell and regular expression syntax, but it is nice to
avoid as much of the oddball details that will change next week as
as possible. The problem is that you don't know which is which until
too late - like after the LSB group meets and decides to move everything
again. Someone should write an 'all you need to know besides webmin'
book that just lists the things you can't do by filling in webmin forms.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
