Re: IBM documentation

Roger,

In a message dated 11/3/99 10:47:05 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
rp@rogerpence.com writes:

> > to another favorite gripe of everybody's... The manuals.... Their tech
>  > writers are terrible... I'm remember when you had good examples of any
>  > new feature that was announced and what it could be used for... Now you
>  > have DIG to even find out a "hint" of what it's really supposed to do,
>  
>  Be careful with generalizations. Not all IBM tech writers are terrible. 
Many
>  AS/400 manuals and documents are well written and easy to understand (the
>  cody examples, though, are particulary bad). The bigger problem with AS/400
>  documentation isn't the quality of the documentation itself, it's the
>  quality of the search engines and indices you use to find stuff. On this
>  front, IBM's AS/400 efforts are nearly laughable. IBM doesn't seem to
>  understand that it could use, well, let's see, A COMPUTER, to improve
>  documentation navigation.
<<snip>>

Yet another "pet peeve" of mine, and probably the source of the "bring back 
the manuals" movement here.  I had a question a while back about M36, yet a 
scan of that phrase returned no hits regarding what I wanted.  Like Micro$oft 
help, the AS/400 manuals have become searchable by all persons that already 
know what they're looking for.  With a paper index, I could use my third 
grade training and think of another subject under which to look.  With 
electronic indices, phraseology is "hit or miss" at best.  The device that 
_ought to_ eliminate the need for manuals is instead instantiating the call 
for their return...

JMHO,

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-mail:  DAsmussen@aol.cm

"Quitting smoking is the easiest thing in the world to do.  I've done it 
thousands of times." -- Mark Twain
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