[plug] Newbie Guide - The beginning

[harrymc at decisions-and-designs.com.au]

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 02:10:12 +0800 "Arie Hol" <arie99 at ozemail.com.au>
wrote:

> Greetings to all, 
> 
> After the AGM, I did some thinking about my comments to the meeting and
> my posts on this list about a 'Newbie Guide'. 
> 
> Then I must have been struck by lightning or hit by a runnaway train or
> something like that -

Good on you Arie. The text that you've written is a solid start.

People have already proceeded down the "there must be some more tech
that we can throw at the problem" and suggested Wiki's (which was
talked over at the AGM). As discussed, it's the content that is
hardest to do (or select). 

I think the way you have done this is much more welcoming. A lot of the
hands-on content in your main TODO sections must heve been written more
than once. I would avoid yet another link farm but it may be a good start
to offer guidance to existing resources in this way:

"
The following reference explains the way the physical layout on the
disk quite well but the author skips over the good reasons for _why_
you would want to divide your disk up into a number of "partitions".
Read the first few paragraphs on the page (and further if you wish) to
learn some of the fundamentals before returning here to explore some page
references below that explain why and when you would want one or more
partitions. The section at the end about spindle speeds is a bit confused
and not very relevant to your exploration at this stage. If it doesn't make
much sense, don't worry. There are better explanations elsewhere if you
really want them. Read on:   

http://www.harrys-hardware-heaven.com/hard-disks.html 
"

That way the guiding messages are "don't expect the web documentation
to be clear, well written, and at your level of understanding. We're
going to surf around picking out the useful bits so you learn to cast
a critical eye over the vast amount of information that is out there."   

If it all starts looking bigger than Ben Hur, then you can check or
ask permissions to copy lumps of the remote content back into a local
page and hack it about for a consistent style. Maybe even a precise
style:

"
In a convoluted article about hard disks Harry Who writes:

Useful gem blah de blah ... [1]

[...]

*later..*

Sources:
[1] http://www.harrys-hardware-heaven.com/hard-disks.html (very wordy and
confused but several useful gems)
"

Starting with a blank page is too hard and why re-invent.

Diagrams can be hard to find or create but they can help hugely to
understand. "A diagram is worth a thousand instruction manuals"

*stops rambling*

Harry

-- 
Are you a computer angel?	http://www.computerangels.org.au/