procmail
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Re: audience for a procmail book?

1996-03-16 00:51:11
        Soren

 On Fri, 15 Mar 1996, Soren Dayton wrote:
I think
that procmail just isn't big enough to be a book.   what things do people

        Compare Procmail with PGP.   

        PGP is a very easy to use 
        program, without reading the documentation.  Yet O'Reilly
        published one of the four or five books available on how
        to use PGP.  

        The books on PGP are basically the documentation, with 
        lots of examples thrown in.   

have trouble with?  the syntax.  regex.  shell scripting issues.. what
else?  Logic..

        A chronic lack of examples in the manual pages for starters.
        << Should I also point out that the examples in the 
        manual pages _don't_ always work, as written.  >>

So how about a lot of really good examples that show a lot of things in

        Examples --- lots of them << even for stupid things, like
        rejecting all mail showing a precedence of first-class >> are
        needed, just to demonstrate what can be done with procmail.

the distributions rather than a book (that is going to be too expensive :)

        How much is the typical O'Reillyy book -- something in the
        $25 to $35 range.  Compare that to the typical computer book
        --- $35 - $50.  

How about encouraging people to read the manpages!  They are excellent as
far as manpages go.    I think that a faq is about right (and it would

        For manual pages they might be excellent.  For the average
        person, who buys _DOS for Dummies_ to learn how to turn 
        a computer on, manual pages represent every horror story
        theve ever experienced with any computer, anywhere. 

be done if my work was not more than full time right now).  

        xan

        jonathon
        grafolog(_at_)netcom(_dot_)com



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