Re: Is my MySQL Gaining ?

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 15:51:00 -0500,
Ericson Smith <eric(at)did-it(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Lets face it, Postgresql is great, but the docs are not. PHP was easy to
> learn because of great function reference, interlinking (leads to
> feature discovery) and excellent user contributed tips which are edited.
> To this day, I still refer to my Postgresql Manual, because it is
> actually faster to find information that way instead of on the website.
> On the other hand, I never have to refer to a PHP dead tree manual.

Once you know where to look for stuff it isn't that hard to find things.

This is one of the advantages of reading through the whole manual once
to get an idea of whats there.

When I need to look things up for Postgres I use a local copy of the web
based documentation.

> In my humble opinion, here's what the documentation needs to make the
> uptake of Postgresql better:
> * A separate page for every Postgresql function

I don't like this. It will make scrolling through a group of related
functions harder. Name anchors can be used to allow links directly to
functions.

> * A custom search engine to address the above -- not just sitewide search
> * More encouragement of user posting to each manual page

Do you see these two points as applying to only the copy of the
documentation on the Postgres web site, or do you see this being distributed
either with the database (as the current documentation is) or as
a separate item (like some of the clients are)?