Re: Informix manuals online

As Mark A. Yingling so eloquently stated: :I recently made an inquiry to my Informix rep about having manuals :on-line. The response that I received was not great (i.e. not much :customer interest, so why do it). I disagree with this assessment. If :you have a shop with more than a few programmers sharing manuals can :be a pain, but at about $700 for a full set of Informix On-Line manuals :it may not be in the budget to provide everyone with a set. It makes :much more sense to me to have manuals on-line and available to :everyone. Almost all our development systems are distributed on CD-ROM. Microsoft has an inexpensive developers CD which is *invaluable* to our work. Intergraph, our CAD vendor, supports on-line manuals and CD distribution. We use Informix for our CAD database engine, BTW. In a review of our CAD systems for a 'major european client', it was determined that on-line manuals would be the 'defacto standard' for CAD documentation because the most recent documentation was on-line with printed manuals lagging by months/years. Sun distributes operating systems and manuals and Q&A (AnswerBook) on CD. Hell, the cost of the CD docs is US$300, printed manuals retail for US$1000. I would expect Informix docs to be priced in a similar fashion. CD production and distribution is very inexpensive (once you shell out for the mastering equipment...). Of *COURSE* we would like to have manuals on-line. The only thing we maintain current hard copy on is our operating systems admin manuals. If the system is not up, its hard to read those on-line manuals! This would not apply to Informix, though. -- Paul Begley Internet: peb@scdipc0.ueci.com Raytheon Engineers & Constructors Voice: 215-422-3997 Philadelphia, PA FAX: 215-422-4095