Re: Call me grumpy, but....

--- "Art S. Kagel" <kagel@bloomberg.net> > wrote: >Obnoxio The Clown wrote: >> >> To get back to the original question. While I appreciate all the comments >> that have been made, I will respectfully beg to differ from Art, et al. on >> the issue of RTFMs. As far as I'm concerned, this newsgroup is not called >> comp.databases.informix.predigested.for.lazy.people (people being the >> politest term I could use.) >> >> I am more than happy to help someone who can't understand things in (or out >> of) the manuals, or who says "I have looked here and here and I can't find >> something", but I really get narked at people who make no effort on their >> part and then expect us to read the manuals for them and spoonfeed it to >> them. >> >> *I* learn stuff here all the time, too. Hell, sometimes I even learn RTFM >> questions myself. But I get tired of answering questions that are clearly in >> the manuals and in the table of contents or index. Repeatedly. That's just >> laziness, and a waste of bandwidth and effort on our part. :-( > >You are right but just saying RTFM is not helpful. Often the questioner is >a newbie who HAS RTFM'd and did not find it or pored<SP?> through a few >manuals for several hours but was looking in the wrong place. At the very >least we should be willing to say: Look in the Guide to SQL, Tutorial or >Look in the Performance Guide, etc. The only thing I could add to that is to add 'look under <Insert Terminology Here>' since the times I have looked for and not found something that was in the manual have almost always been due to not knowing what to call the thing I want to do. A prime example was the TO_CHAR() function pointed out today. I didn't know about it and spent much time last week looking under USING and DATE since I knew what I wanted to do was format a date in a select statement similar to USING in 4gl. In this particular case, I still can't find it in a manual, but if I could I still wouldn't have known what to call it last week (which is why I didn't find it then). carlos == Maintainer of the procrastinator's FAQ. Well, maybe tomorrow I will be. _____________________________________________________________ Want a new web-based email account ? ---> http://www.firstlinux.net