On Mon, 10 Apr 2017 17:10:55 -0500 Adam Thompson <athom...@athompso.net> wrote:
> You've asked almost the same question as "why does anyone need > tutorials? just read the man pages!" just at the next level up. The > answer is because the man pages aren't adequate to cover every > scenario, and not everyone can read man pages effectively. People > have different learning styles, if nothing else. I learn best by > seeing examples and asking questions. (In fact, the lack of good > examples is a pet peeve of mine with the OpenBSD man pages, but > that's another story.) Another issue with the man pages is that there is extremely limited indexing. I have often had to google or find tutorials, only to find there's this "new" device or program I never heard of. $ apropos -i EXDEV apropos: nothing appropriate $ man errno | grep -i EXDEV 18 EXDEV Cross-device link. A hard link to a file on another file system $ Either I am doing something wrong here, or the indexing is junk. > > I've attended Peter's seminar two?, maybe three? times now, and got > something new out of it each time - some nuance that wasn't obvious > just from reading pf.conf(5). Sometimes it was something Peter said, > sometimes it was something another attendee said. That's the value > of attending any training class or seminar, not just this one for PF. > > The tutorial is aimed not at people who would go and produce another > tutorial, but at ordinary system administrators who don't have time > to pore over the entire manpage, who want the most relevant > information to them distilled and delivered efficiently. > > Plus, this year it appears that Peter is co-delivering the seminar > with Massimiliano Stucchi from RIPE, so it will presumably cover a > lot of IPv6 topics as well, which are poorly represented in existing > materials and yet increasingly relevant. And for those of us who cannot attend, hopefully it will be on video. > > Disclaimer: I now help organize (one small) part of BSDCan & PgCon, > so I'm not *entirely* unbiased, but this is pretty much what I would > have said the first two years I attended, anyway. > > -Adam