Linux Documentation: What’s There and What’s Needed

by

Andy Oram
February 4, 2004

The following is condensed from a talk I gave at LinuxWorld in January 2004.

If we look at the types of documentation needed in the Linux community, it leads to a general discussion about different types of computer documentation and the learning needs of computer users.

The Linux Documentation Project

When one talks of Linux documentation, one should think first and always of the Linux Documentation Project. Linux started to congeal and take off in 1992, and it was around the same time that the LDP appeared, founded by Matt Welsh (who soon wrote Running Linux for O'Reilly). The LDP is an impressive organization that has editors, guidelines for reviewers, procedures for updating documents, translators--in short, an it's an organization that has tried to reproduce everything about conventional publishers, but in an open and volunteer manner.

The LDP is a phenomenon we should all be following as a model for documentation in an open source community. The quality of its output, as one might expect, varies widely. At the high end, a few documents outrank the information in most conventional, published books. At the low end one finds mushy, vague descriptions of no interest to anybody, sometimes written by people for whom English is not only not a first language, but not a language.

The LDP is a fine achievement, but it's fragile. One would be overly generous to say it runs on a shoestring budget. It basically has nothing but a Web site and a few tremendously dedicated and inspired volunteers who manage to keep the documentation flowing from multiple contributors. They need an infrastructure, including the kinds of legal protections for which such open source projects as Apache, GNOME, and Eclipse set up foundations. People who care about documentation should talk to the companies pouring money into Linux and get them to set aside a little bit of those funds to put the LDP on firm ground. Even though the LDP could be viewed in some sense as competition to O'Reilly, I feel they are very important.

Three audiences

Let's look now at Linux documentation as a whole. I won't treat the valuable but amorphous range of informal documentation in the form of journal articles, newsgroups, and even chat rooms; it's enough in this talk to stick to the conventional books that are understood when one uses the term documentation.

The computer field has long divided documentation into three categories based on audience--end users, system administrators, and programmers--a division that applies well to Linux.

End users

There are some good beginner's books for end users that succeed in the sense that they make Linux seem simple. If anything, I'm afraid they oversimplify. Sometimes things on Linux just don't work right. A configuration file has the wrong default setting, or you install a program and it fails to put a menu item on your start-up menu, or conversely, an item on your start-up menu fails because some file association is incorrect. And people need help fixing these problems.

It's traditional to say that problems like these should be solved by making the software systems themselves more robust and by planning to make everything work together in advance. Just as when you buy a Macintosh, you should be able to install Linux and have everything just work. The end-user documentation should not have to deal with incongruities.

Certainly, standards for installing software and making programs interoperate correctly are valuable. But I fear the results of putting too many constraints on programs. Something of the openness of systems might be lost. In theory, one should be able to define standards that make all software work together robustly without excluding innovative developers. But in practice, I think developers on the fringe would lose out if Linux became like a Macintosh. So let's allow some flakiness around the edges and give end users documentation that help them deal with it--more on this later.

System administrators

System administration documentation is the largest category in Linux, and it addresses a lot of areas well. It's gratifying to see so many books that provide background, take readers through complex processes step by step, and, most significantly, allow them to backtrack and trouble-shoot what they're doing. For instance, one regularly sees books warn users to run ps to make sure a background daemon is running before carrying out steps that assume the presence of that daemon. That's a simple example of good, belt-and-suspenders system administration, and a lot of authors know what to do.

Programmers

There is much less documentation for programmers on Linux, and the books I do see on the shelves don't sell very well compared to the other kinds of Linux books. I've spent a lot of time--since it's my job to figure out where to put my company's resources--trying to figure out why people in the Linux and open source areas don't buy many books on programming, and I can merely cite a few hypotheses.

One possibility is that there just aren't many people writing programs for Linux, KDE, GNOME, etc. If that's true, it's a big problem that's going to bite Linux in the future. But it's a situation that could also change rapidly. I don't think this is necessarily true, and in any case it doesn't strike me as the major reason for poor sales of programming books.

Another hypothesis I've considered is that, after all, Linux is modeled after Unix and the desktops offer programming models similar to other toolkits used on the X Window system, so there are lots of people who have learned the basic programming techniques already. Maybe all the Linux/X programmers are old hacks who don't need new documentation. But when I look at the age of the people doing the coding, I know that can't be the explanation.

Finally it occurred to me that the lack of interest in programming books may be caused by the availability of other sources of information. If programmers can get what they need elsewhere, they won't buy many books.

And what do programmers always say is the best documentation? Source code! So that may ultimately be the explanation. When so many open source applications are out there for everyone to see--including the efforts of the best coders in the industry--programmers may be finding enough to get them going.

What the Linux field needs

So our field is doing pretty well, in terms of both formal and informal documentation. But we still could do better. I'll give a bit of history of computer documentation to show where we're still weak.

Reference manuals

The first computer documentation was awful three-ring-binder reference listings filled with sentences such as, "The /x25 option invokes the X.25 protocol on the line." Nearly all documentation (which, I'm told, has its roots in military technical manuals) was like this from the beginnings of the computer industry until the 1980s, when nonprofessionals started to get their hands on computers. But certainly, reference documentation is still important, and some of the best-selling O'Reilly books (including Linux in a Nutshell) fall in that category.

User-friendly documentation

In the 1980s a revolt broke out among technical writers, who insisted on writing what they called user-friendly manuals. This led to sleek and glossy books with lots of little icons and and tricks of layout (facilitated by the simultaneous rise of desktop publishing) and sentences such as "To print your document, pull down the File menu and choose Print." Hmm, that sounds pretty much like the old X.25 example, doesn't it? Often, under the friendly exterior, the user-friendly documentation wasn't much better than the old stuff.

But this is being a bit unfair. The writers of user-friendly documentation tried to be task-oriented. When done properly, the documentation helped readers understand what their systems were capable of doing, and even sometimes helped them decide on their needs.

User-friendly documentation is represented today at its best in the Missing Manual series. I say not simply because they're put out by O'Reilly, but because sales figures show how wildly popular they are. Missing Manuals are often at the top of the charts, particularly the Mac OS X Missing Manual, which has kept its best-seller status for years.

Model-building documentation

During the craze to do user-friendly documentation with lines such as "To print your document, pull down the File menu and choose Print," few technical writers tried to think further or deeper about how to educate users. But another experiment was tried during the 1980s, a little-known movement called minimalist documentation.

The goal of minimalist documentation was not to convey facts--as was the goal of all computer documentation up to that time--but to help readers build the mental models that would help them solve problems they encountered by themselves. The movement was called "minimalist" because the documents were short and actually told the user as little as possible. Typically, they'd show some menu or dialog box and encourage the reader to play around with it herself. The psychologists who invented this experimental documentation (I know of no commercial examples) deliberately wanted to set users free and force them to take responsibility for themselves.

Mental models help you figure out where to go to solve a problem. They help you guess that a certain setting must be missing from a certain file, or that a certain daemon is not running, or that a certain data format is not being recognized by the recipient of the data.

It's very hard to form mental models. Readers certainly need background information, but often they are not helped by simply having information thrown at them. One must empower them to explore their systems. Metaphors and exercises--fixtures of the Head First series at O'Reilly, which are credited by many readers for helping them understand complicated subjects that other books didn't explain--are often critical. And that's where the Linux field, like many other areas of computing, can do better.

The person who doesn't want to learn

I've been asked what to do for users who just don't want to learn. Documentation is clearly of little value in this case. First of all, not everybody should have to learn their systems in depth; just like stoves or television sets, systems should provide basic functionality in intuitive ways. But people often want to learn when someone sits down with them and shows them the power of the system. One needs to induce a "Wow, I could do that" feeling.

This is a general topic for the field of education. Lots of dollars are spent trying to figure out how to teach the hard-to-teach children. And like the computer users who don't want to learn, the main hurdle to overcome with hard-to-teach children is motivation. Because of socio-economic stresses or learning disabilities or other underlying problems, these children can't take advantage of the resources teachers offer because the children don't see a reason to.

I think the arts are a major motivator for learning. Show the children exciting art and play wonderful music for them. Teach them to make their own art and music. Along the way they'll come to realize that they need mathematics to understand rhythm and harmony or perspective. They need physics to understand musical timbre and chemistry to understand how materials form artworks. They need to study history to understand what led their favorite musicians and artists to make the works they love.

So the desire to learn has to be nurtured individually in each person, but there are certain experiences that have a high likelihood of turning people into learners.


Andy Oram, andyo@oreilly.com, is an editor at O’Reilly Media. This article represents his views only.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.