Well, I certainly started with dead trees, and I occasionally have cause to use them, but generally I am more production with a machine readable version (I want Bookie back!)
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Andrew Rowley <and...@blackhillsoftware.com> Sent: Friday, March 1, 2019 6:10 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: New look and linking for V2.3 product documentation PDFs On 2/03/2019 4:55 am, Seymour J Metz wrote: > I can see making copies for laptops off of the Internet, but dead tree? I > wish I didn't believe you. > You can tell the people who learned from printed manuals from those who use only softcopy ones - the people who learned from softcopy ask "How do I do..." and the people who learned from hardcopy answer them. (Mostly joking!) I suspect most of us on this list are old enough to have started in mainframe with hardcopy manuals. We may not appreciate how difficult it is to learn z/OS without them. When learning a complex new concept, a hardcopy manual where you can stick a finger in a page, flip backwards, view multiple pages at once, refer to another chapter etc. is much easier than softcopy. Is it surprising that a 1000 page manual contains information that softcopy users never see? There's a couple of manuals I print in full, more often I will print a chapter or 2. Even then the majority of time I use softcopy, but occasionally when it's a complex topic and my brain starts to strain I pull out the hardcopy. I almost always learn something new as I flip through to the correct chapter. I could postulate that the technologies that have met with most resistance on the mainframe (e.g. z/OS Unix, Java) are those that came along after the switch to softcopy manuals, so people never had the opportunity to read and learn from hardcopy. Andrew Rowley ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
