[CentOS] A question

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 10:15 AM,  <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
>>
>>>> But real books don't have that 'search' box up at the top...
>>> <SNIP>
>>> Agree with one of the other responders about that's what the index is
>>> for. One of my "tests" for a book on the subject is to go to the index
and
>>>  see how easy it is to find the answers to some of the questions I have
>>> that have moved me to buy a book on the subject.
>
> If you know the right question ahead of time you probably really don't
> need the book.

Not necessarily. Sometimes, you know *something* the book covers, but not
all, or not nearly all. You can look for answers to stuff you've had
trouble solving.
>
>> Reminds me of the *only* O'Reilly book I didn't like: I think it was
>> Larry's original book on Perl - the index was *dreadful*, couldn't find
>> anything.
>
> On the other hand, if you wrote a perl program following those
> examples, it would almost certainly still run today, with the only
> change it might need being to escape @ symbols that you had in
> double-quoted strings. That's pretty rare.

Well, yes. And I can do the same with my favorite language of all, ANSI C.

Breaking a language, unless there's no other answer, is NOT something I
have any sympathy with, he says, remembering how ever sub-release of
python 10-12 years ago would break previous system scripts, or then
there's ruby now....

       mark "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our language, but in our code"