RTFM = Read the Funny Manual?

coronaride writes: "This article over on Wired discusses the issue near and dear to every sysadmin and support tech's heart. I, myself, never read any manuals that accompany the products I buy (but when does cheese-whiz really need instructions anyways?) unless something majorly goes wrong! The article talks about how some countries, including Japan, try to spice up their product manuals in order to entice the users to read them. Is this just too much work for our lazy American manufacturers to do?"

Comments

O' Reilly

[NewOrder]

My O'Reilly books, mainly the perl ones have sime good humor and some really bad humor.. They are some of the best book around tho.

O'Reilly

[interiot]

O'Reilly books are written in a more informal tone, and many people like them because of this.

However, I like the informal tone for a different reason altogher. It leads to "unique" quotes, which can be used in Robust Hyperlinks (re: the recent Google programming contest).

Here are some examples, from O'Reilly's "Programming Perl".

• "enumerating these weird, quote-like operators"
• "Perl variable lives in a symbol table and holds one hard reference to its underlying thingy"

Besides being useful in the longer run, hopefully these also get around the precedent set by the 2600 ruling, that links can be illegal.

For a more complete set of examples, see this page.