[Pdx-pm] perldoc ...

[Tom Heady]

> On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 13:15 -0800, Ben Prew wrote:
>> On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 11:09:59 -0800, Steven Adams
>> <mongers at nwtechops.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > > Because using perldoc in the Windows command line is _painful_
>> >
>> > Never tried it. What makes perldoc so painful in Windows?
>>
>> Imagine using more, without searching capabilities, without being able
>> to go backwards in a document and only allowed to page over a single
>> page, or having to specify the number of lines you want to move
>> forward.
>>


Of course that's even assuming you know what "perldoc" means. The phrase
"perldoc perldsc" means nothing to someone that has been programming
(*gasp*) vb, or pretty much anything else on windows.  For years I had no
clue what people were talking about, and I just got my information from
web pages and archived news posts.  I was estatic when I discovered
perldoc.com
While we're on the topic or perldoc, I've always wondered about the
discoverability of the perl man pages.  "man perldsc" or "perldoc perldsc"
is not the first thing that would come to my mind if I was searching for
information about recursive data structures, and it seems most of the man
pages are that way.  They have just never made sense to me, coming from a
windows world, thus it is never the first place I look for info.
Has anyone else had this problem?  How did you solve it?

You might now be saying "all the beginners pages/books cover this stuff"
or something like that, so let me tell you how I started with perl.
Around 1996 I wanted a news page on my website.  I tried looking for
something simple for vb: writing out to a text file.  I couldn't afford a
book, so I looked online.  This should be easy, I thought, and i guess it
was so easy no one had any examples that I could find.  Of course I had no
idea what I was really looking for anyway.  Finally I found Matt's script
archive and an hour later it was working.  I was completely clueless, but
I got it to work.  That was the beauty of it.  As mentioned above, it was
not until years later that I learned about "perldoc", and even now I don't
use it very often, preferring webpages and newsgroup discussion archives.
So, yes, when someone asks a question, I do tend to send them "off their
box" because that where I look, and where I get my information.
Tom