[u-u] Sams book

[arocker at Vex.Net]

>From Hugh Redelmeier

> I don't really remember not knowing how to program or use a Unix shell.

That's one of the paradoxes of teaching (and writing documentation).

Someone who knows the topic really well often doesn't remember what the
state of ignorance was like. One no longer knows what it is that the
reader/student doesn't know. The right order to present necessary material
without digression or backtracking isn't always obvious.

A shell course I taught was written with ls as the first topic, but I
found it worked better if man came first. man man was easy to remember and
type, and led to everything else. apropos or man -k came next, for people
who didn't know what they should be looking up.

Academic material can be particularly bad, because it is often designed to
show off the author's cleverness, or filter students by their skills,
rather than communicate behaviours.