Author
Example Driven Documentation
I've been collecting my notes on how to do all sorts of things in linux since 2001 or so, which I am posting here. Perhaps you will find some of them useful.
Although the documentation available for linux and open source software in general is simply amazing in quality and scope, I have noticed an acute lack of a certain type of documentation.
I have always learned best by seeing complete examples of how to do things spelled out. I want to see the smallest / simplest non-trivial example first and have it build up from there. I want to see small, relevant bits of explanation/theory mixed in with each example. Although you rarely see books written in that sytle, "The C Programming Language" comes very close to this ideal.
Part of the reason this sort of documentation is rare is an honest difference of opinion. Different people have different tripping points. Another part is that it is rare for people who are really good at something to also happen to be good at explaining it.
With most documentation I come across when researching new topics in linux, I often find it takes me a long time to get even the simplest working example that does something interesting. That has been improving over time, to be sure. I hope to contribute to this.
I started this site to experiment with writing example driven documentation. You'll find my attempts in the "polished" section below.
A Warning
You going to have to be a linux and/or unix programmer to get much out of most of what's here.
Topics
Polished
Here are collections of example-driven tutorial articles I have put some time and effort into writing. Each article here begins with a minimal command sequence then attempts to explain it.
Raw
Collected here are text files of my notes on how to do things in linux. Whenever I discover some commands to do something interesting, I go to a set of text files I keep and jot down the commands. They are written in my own mentalese and unorganized, so please be warned!
Some of these notes files are actually bash scripts that demonstrate how something works. In those cases, dump the text into a file, say example.sh, make it executable (chmod a+rx ./example.sh), and run it.
The notes files that are not bash scripts will often look just like a bash script (because of how I group literal commands together and put bash style comments above them). Just check the first line of the file. If the first line is "#!/bin/bash", then you are meant to copy the text into a file, mark it as executable, and run it.
I am amazed at how useful I have found this simple practice. I can go back to a topic I haven't touched in years (how to do merging in CVS, for example) and pick up right where I left off.
Unpolished
Here are articles I don't feel I am happy with yet. Some of them are simple collections of notes on topics I am currently experimenting with no real structure to them.
Fragments
Here's a mystery. This link:
is broken. You won't find anything there. Can you guess why?