[plug] Unix Beginners Textbook?

[Christian]

Trevor Phillips wrote:
> Oh, and yes Christian, I do teach them man(1), but that doesn't help when doing
> assignments at home under Windows, nor in an Exam, nor does it give a "Complete
> Beginner's Guide" to general concepts. Man can be pretty intimidating at times,
> even to the more experience Linux user. ^_^

Assignments or exams which require memorisation of command line options
etc. seem pretty silly and are particularly  unrealistic.  Teaching
people to use (and depend on) the online manual pages is much more
constructive than providing users with what are thinned-down, paper
versions of the proper documentation.  If you need to provide students
with exam questions which depend on this then you should provide printed
versions of the manual pages required as part of the exam paper.  And,
yes, man can be intimiating for some people but that's all the more
reason to force them to use it so that they become familiar with it and
no longer find it intimidating.  I personally refuse to buy books which
fill up their quota of pages by copying, often almost verbatim,
information from the online manual pages.  If I'm going to pay for a
book then I want the benefit of the author's hard work and
understanding, I don't want to be shelling out for information they've
just copied from the official source.