Einstein reportedly said “Never memorize something you can look up in a book”. When asked the speed of sound he said , “I do not know but that number is commonly found in textbooks”.
I am not going to spend my life reading manuals. Reading my furnace manual years before a problem arises is unlikely to help me.
However, I completely agree that RTFM is a great thing to do with confronted with a gap in knowledge or problem to be solved. Not the whole manual probably, just the relevant parts.
I think it is much more important to store ideas in your head than information. That said, those ideas do not come from nothing.
I might not read the man pages of every command on a Linux system. At least, not all of them. But I should know high-level what commands are available and what they generally do. That allows me to think of them when they would be useful. But I probably have no idea what the proper syntax is for any of them when I go to use them.
And “the manual” is not always the best place to get ideas, even if it is the authoritative source for specific knowledge.
Time spent reading the manual is time not spent doing something else. Spend your time learning. Spend most of it learning what is possible. In my view, that is the best strategy.
I think reading the manual gives you the concept of what something is capable of doing. No one is saying memorize all the commands and their flags.
But if you read all of them, maybe some day you’ll have a problem and realize, wait… I’ve seen something like this before. And you can then look up the specifics.
Einstein reportedly said “Never memorize something you can look up in a book”. When asked the speed of sound he said , “I do not know but that number is commonly found in textbooks”.
I am not going to spend my life reading manuals. Reading my furnace manual years before a problem arises is unlikely to help me.
However, I completely agree that RTFM is a great thing to do with confronted with a gap in knowledge or problem to be solved. Not the whole manual probably, just the relevant parts.
I think it is much more important to store ideas in your head than information. That said, those ideas do not come from nothing.
I might not read the man pages of every command on a Linux system. At least, not all of them. But I should know high-level what commands are available and what they generally do. That allows me to think of them when they would be useful. But I probably have no idea what the proper syntax is for any of them when I go to use them.
And “the manual” is not always the best place to get ideas, even if it is the authoritative source for specific knowledge.
Time spent reading the manual is time not spent doing something else. Spend your time learning. Spend most of it learning what is possible. In my view, that is the best strategy.
I think reading the manual gives you the concept of what something is capable of doing. No one is saying memorize all the commands and their flags.
But if you read all of them, maybe some day you’ll have a problem and realize, wait… I’ve seen something like this before. And you can then look up the specifics.
We may not be disagreeing. I guess it depends what you mean by read.