Hi Alfie, On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Alfie John <alfie@xxxxxx> wrote: > Hey, > >> I don't doubt that these are the best currently available books on >> their subject matter, but in the end, I don't think standards(7) >> should act as a bibliography. > >> But my inclination would be to take the references to Gallmeister and >> Lewine out (both now rather dated), rather than add more references. >> And in fact, that is what I've done. (Adding more books to >> standards(7) would only lead me into temptation one day in the >> future.) > > Are you sure that is the best thing to do? Man pages are there to help the > reader get a better picture. The more information the better I would have > thought. > > What if somebody were to look at standards(7) and wanted to know more > information? Instead of going to what people considered the best material > available (be it books, websites etc), they would instead waste their time > searching and maybe getting inferior or incorrect information. This leads > to floods of questions to forums, IRC and mailing lists. And I'm sure one > common response to these type of questions is going to be "if you want > more info, the best place is X book"! To which my answer would be: look at a search engine, or an online bookstore. I don't think it is the place of man pages to adjudicate on what are the "best" books. > It would cut out the middle man if references were there from the > beginning :) > >> So, sorry -- but I won't take this patch. > > No problem. I'm just trying to help out people who are in the same boat as > me -- people wanting to know where the best place to find things are. > Maybe a man page called "unix-references", "unix-books" or > "programming-books" would be a better option. Or maybe looking somewhere else than man pages is best ;-). Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git man-pages online: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
