Re^4: Perl documentation documentation

[Ytrew]

in reply to Re^3: Perl documentation documentation
in thread Perl documentation documentation

I think it's actually a reasonable piece of documentation; it contains at least one piece of information that I didn't know for several years after using perl. Specifically, it took me about three years before I realized that the perldoc command had the "-f" switch.

When I first started learning perl, I usually wanted to read the entire manual page, anyway. To my mind (and perhaps in the earlier versions of perldoc, I don't remember now), "perldoc" <topic> and "man" <topic> were essentially equivalent.

It wasn't until I moved to the ActiveState release of perl (with no man pages under Windows), that I realized how useful "perldoc -f" was.

So I'd support the notion of "meta-documentation" for that reason alone. Additionally, online documentation written for different intended audience than the traditional CS student with a background in C and UNIX might be helpful as well.

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Ytrew