That's how I learned a lot of things; by literally scanning through everything it had to offer and googling what I didn't understand. I did that for linux utils, language references, most programs I use and most codebases I had to work on.

One notable example is the time I had to learn C# 4 years ago. It took an entire morning to scan through the entire language reference and then later I found out I already knew a lot more than "advanced" devs who would just look up stuff as they needed it, without knowing what actually is available in the first place.

I feel its the only sensible advice if you want to learn a lot on your own with limited time.

My experience has been that it’s most important to get started. Then you can scan and read man pages etc.

It's how I learned, back in dial-up days.

Coreutils is a good place to start.

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils.html

I’m not saying you can’t learn this way. I’m saying it’s not practical for most people. Many people who would fail this way would succeed other ways. Reading man bash as primary learning material will lead to failure for 999/1000 humans.

Try 'info bash', it's a lot easier to browse. 'info' by itself gives you a menu of installed info documentation. 'C-h i' in Emacs.

That just means the man page you're using sucks.

I’ve wanted to read man bash, and believe me, I’d think I was the kind of person who would (I learned Go just reading the spec. It’s a great spec), but man bash and many other man pages have never worked for me. Maybe if I tried again now.

bash, incidentally, has a man page that sucks. I've found that most larger GNU projects have pretty horrible man pages. Probably due to feature creep in said projects - so the manuals have to be large to cover all the features.

I spent 10 years avoiding awk, because every time I typed 'man awk' I was overwhelmed by the GNU monstrosity. Then I found the man page for the plan9 implementation of awk (http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/awk) and learned the language in fifteen minutes.

> I've found that most larger GNU projects have pretty horrible man pages. Probably due to feature creep in said projects - so the manuals have to be large to cover all the features.

Rather, info manuals are GNU's official (self-invented I think) documentation system. They make manpages only because of their popularity, but they direct you to the info pages for more info. When other projects have too much documentation for a manpage, they split it among several pages, like perl, openssl, zsh, git, borg, btrfs, etc. Personally, I like both, and wouldn't rank one above the other.

It's far better than Googling or guessing for them. Looking in those places provides exactly what is on your system and the man pages exactly describe what they are for.

If there is a better source, I don't know it.

Yes, it is practically useful advice, especially when you’re on a flight with no WiFi.

That’s a good use case. Believe me I’m into man pages. Every 6 months I check the Apple store to see if anyone has created a good man pages app. But as primary learning material for most people: not so sure.

That is exactly how I learned how things worked.

I never thought of that, and said to myself, "Hmmm... that is a good idea."