Bill Oliver's essay on "just follow instructions".

[Roger]

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2013-October/441664.html

Bill got it Sooo right.
No set of instructions is all inclusive because they are written by 
experts who have forgotten or neglected the little gotchas experienced 
as they learned.
A recent example.
Installing postgresql on Fedora 19. I tried for months and having a 
little time to play in, finally achieved a result last night about 
11:30pm after hours of experimenting.

Instructions are there, yes, but stop at a crucial point. Starting then 
using postgres in a terminal is a three step process, to create a 
database from the previous basis is a three step process, same with 
creating user and role and grant permissions. Each requires more hours 
of searching for entirely different instructions to interpret. Yes 
detailed instructions abound but not one explanation of what to do when 
an instruction is just plain wrong.

For Postgres with Rails  - the instructions miss one tiny, almost 
insignificant gotcha. libpq-dev
  with out which Rails cannot run rake db:migrate.
Except there is no libpq-dev for Fedora.
No one bothers to mention that. Or that you have to search for and sudo 
yum install postgresql-devel which to a novice and for my first times 
defied explanation. The names have no similarity. Error messages are 
cryptic and unrelated.

Following instructions achieved little. However experience, this List, 
having an inkling from years past, remembering past experiences and 
knowing what to "see" in the hundreds of google pages got it working.

Another example.
If someone were to write a set of instructions for setting up say, a 
small home network for eth0 and wireless using, for example,  the 
telstra TH782t modem/router, a desktop and a few wireless laptops, it 
would take a book to go through and explain all the variations gotchas 
and fixes.  Instructions alluded to the process, which in my case did 
not work for a couple of reasons.

Unless instructions are carefully crafted they are just words in the wind.

Roger