On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 8:11 PM, Alan Altmark <alan_altm...@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> The Information Center is very nice in that regard. You can download and > run it on your workstation if you like, or you can use the Internet > version. Learning curve is nil. Don't make me laugh. I thought you had 2 more weeks before your new job... Yeah, I frequently have cases like "I really need to find what the default msglimit is for the IUCV statement in the directory, but the learning curve for using my PDF Reader is so steep... " I have a copy of most z/VM PDFs on my laptop and hacked a copy of the HTML index from the VM web site to navigate that. Way cool. Google Desktop Search even searches them when I need. I rarely agree with David, but with respect to the Information Center it's hard to avoid. You may throw that stuff as far as you can (though not in this direction please) Only use it for the VM books by accident when Google leads me there, but I've used it more often for IBM middleware (online, so the latency may be part of my user experience). What I really hate is getting returned a list of a few hits with no indication that it's still searching and will add more later. Similar things happen with text where you see a paragraph and conclude required detail is not there, and then more lines are still added. A lot of the books suffer from too deep nesting of sections. That makes for an attractive layout in print and PDF, but is tedious with expand/hide process of Info Centers. When I click in the ToC under "IUCV Statement" a section called "Operands" then I expect to see the operands like in the book itself, not an empty paragraph and again new level of headings. Go ahead, try search the WAS InfoCenter on "memory tuning" - this gives you lots of references that all look the same because the InfoCenter has the books for WAS on 7 different platforms all merged together. So you get all the duplicated sections as well. Try finding how to restrict the search to the pieces that are relevant for you. Sure, it can be done by constructing your own virtual slice of a book in InfoCenter... But only if you're more patient and desperate than me. I downloaded the relevant PDF and read applicable sections as if it were a book (not much of a learning curve there) | Rob
