OT What does RET (Enter) do and how does it do it ??

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Saturday 25 August 2007 17:45, William Case wrote:
> I have found there is a lot of
> information out there for "newbies" and a lot of exchanges of
> information for "gurus".  But there is not much for those who have
> passed the newbie stage, but aren't yet ready to communicate with the
> gurus. People who you might call "newrus" or "gurbies".

Well, the terms "newbie", "newru", "gurbie" and "guru" are 
interpretation-dependent. Every person has a different amount of background 
knowledge related to particular subject, so it is very hard to create any 
kind of documentation that would classify knowledge somehow. At least, it is 
very ungrateful task.

A typical situation is when someone asks for a good book on learning C++. What 
is a "good book" strongly depends on whether or not he is already familiar 
with C, for example.

In general, the split of the documentation into "for gurus" and "for idiots" 
categories is the simplest one and easiest to write. I guess that is the 
reason why one encounters such docs most of the time.

> What I would now like ask is, is someone saving, arranging, compiling,
> harvesting these middle level answers so they can easily be found by the
> newrus and gurbies of the world?  I know how long I have spent searching
> for answers or explanations.

I have found the HOWTOs (www.tldp.org) quite full of information. The name 
suggests that they are a set of recipes for accomplishing certain tasks, but 
when one actually starts reading them, often one can also find information 
about what actually happens in the background and how is something designed 
(be it software, process, protocol, hardware, etc...). It came to me as a 
very nice surprise that the philosophy of writing HOWTOs was not just "if you 
do this and set up this, that will happen", but more down to "understand how 
this works, what you can set up, and then conclude what do you get as a 
result". When dealing with a particular problem, it is always better to 
*understand* what is going on, than to blindly follow instructions.

Of course, if your question goes deeper than what HOWTO covers, there is  
always a deeper level of documentation. Of course, the gap may sometimes be 
big and have a steep learning curve. And, contrary to Windows, there *is* the 
lowest level of documentation available, so if all other docs fail,
use the Source, Luke! ;-)

I had such a situation some time ago. I was to write a custom app that needed 
*full control* of the keyboard (meaning that no keypress gets swallowed by 
any other app, no matter focus etc), and after reading all relevant HOWTOs, I 
finally understood the process of reading off keyboard input. But, there was 
nothing in the docs telling me how to lock the keyboard for my app. So, after 
some digging, I downloaded the very source code for the simple "showkey" 
program, and studied it. There, and only there, I actually found relevant 
info on what I needed to do in my app. After that, life was beautiful... ;-)

The moral of the story: there is no sharp line between a "gurbie" and a 
"guru". All you need to do is to be stubborn enough to read and learn, and 
you'll end up swimming in guru waters, without even noticing it.

Best regards, :-)
Marko

Marko Vojinovic
Institute of Physics
University of Belgrade
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e-mail: vmarko at phy.bg.ac.yu