John Carmack – Programming Neural Net Library on OpenBSD

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27 points·symisc_devel··4 comments

> I appreciated the good man pages, as I tried to do everything within the self contained system, without resorting to internet searches.

I've been trying pretty hard to commit to this style of learning. It seems to me that using the internet to discover deep, comprehensive, self-contained resources for offline learning is an incredibly powerful way to learn. A pseudo-inverse to this idea is that over-use of search engines can really hamstring the learning process.

The idea as I now articulate it seems sort of platitudinal, but I'm nevertheless glad to have started paying attention to it in recent months.

Back in the early nineties I learned QBasic with its built-in documentation only. The local library had a ton of Basic books, but they were meant for learning simple game programming on 1980s home computers and often only covered a very limited subset of different dialects.

I learned how to program X11 using mainly the man pages and lots of Coke. Kenton Lee's X resources (http://www.rahul.net/kenton/bib.html) also helped.

Later I wrote a simple NetBSD character device driver -- using only the man pages as a reference. BSD man pages are that freaking good.

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518726

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