Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!uxc!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!ubvax!ardent!rap!rap
From: rap@rap.ardent.com (Rob Peck)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Neophyte's Blues
Keywords: Amiga 500, four days old, cool, now what?
Message-ID: <6132@ardent.UUCP>
Date: 1 May 89 16:39:53 GMT
References: <10251@ihlpb.ATT.COM> <1989Apr28.174425.7221@utpsych.toronto.edu>
Sender: news@ardent.UUCP
Reply-To: rap@rap.ardent.com (Rob Peck)
Organization: Ardent Computer Corp., Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 36

In article <1989Apr28.174425.7221@utpsych.toronto.edu> davidb@psych.toronto.edu (David Brodbeck) writes:
>>am hacking my way through CLI.  What now?  Is there anything that you'd wished
>>you'd known when you first bought an Amiga?  What can you tell a neophyte (to
>>the Amiga, not computers) that he might find helpful?
>
>	First of all get an AmigaDOS manual.  I too had to basically hack
>my way through the CLI since there was no documentation bundled with the
>1000 (that I got in November of 86) that dealt with DOS.  There was that
>cute tutorial, what ever happened to that?  I digress, I had to teach
>myself AmigaDOS which was,   well,  A pain to say the least.  There is
>some stuff in the Introduction to the A500 book about the CLI and it
>could be helpful.  

The "stuff" in the A500 book about the CLI was extracted, almost intact,
from section 1.6 of the AmigaDOS Manual... which SECTION I wrote.  The rest
of the AmigaDOS Manual was written by the folks who wrote the DOS itself.
Three years since the AmigaDOS Manual had been written, I sincerely believed
that none of the books that had come out in competition with it had done
an adequate job of helping the new user... they copied the layout and
organization of the AmigaDOS manual, sometimes down to the table of contents,
i.e. a chapter on ED, a chapter on EDIT, then Un*x-style man-pages in
alphabetical order, with no information whatsoever telling a new user
WHY they might be interested in learning about the commands.

So with Amiga World, I created the Amiga Companion (blatant commercial
plug, but helpful to new users reading the net, so what the heck :-)
It is fully tutorial for AmigaDOS: type this, here's what it outputs,
here's what that means, and here's WHY you wanted to use the command.
For most everything.  Second edition in process, available RSN :-),
covers all 1.3 options and commands, AND was written with a single-drive
owner in mind for everything.  Some copies of first edition still
available, and Preface has an offer to obtain second edition updates
directly from me so as to have second edition equivalent weeks or months
ahead of actual availability of the (slightly) higher priced new book.

Rob Peck