Skip to main content

RTFM Not Just a Disgruntled Reply

Are you or have you been new to something technical? Of course. Have you asked a question when you were lost? Have you been told, by those who you trusted to enlighten your path, "RTFM!"? Well, you are not alone, and if you felt you got a raw deal, you are not alone. However, you are wrong. "RTFM" is a perfectly valid and, despite the opinion of many, very good advice in your time of need, indeed.

The camp of the knowledge seekers is seperated into two groups, with the line between them varying depending on the context. The first and largest group is the active knowledge seeker, who is after some bit of information. The second and smaller group are those who have that information. The seeking group has two options to get what they need: utilizing known resources, such as books and articles and tutorials; or, asking those who have previously sought and found, and can give them the information they seek quickly, without wading through entire volumes of documentation.

The knowledge holders are becoming personal googles.

When you turn a sage into a personal google, you injure the spirit of both the knowledgeable and the Google. It is insulting to someone who takes time of their day, away from their job and family, volunteering for your sake, because they would prefer actually interesting questions and if you can read it in "The 'Freaking' Manual", then its not so intersting a problem to solve. When you are after such trivial issues, you have a perfect opportunity to use the wonder free service offered to you by the many choices of search engine. By going to the knowledged with small questions, you waste their time and misuse the technology they enjoy, which doesn't do anything but discourage their volunteering of their time until you actually need their help, and they are gone, and Google has reduced in its usefulness because you finally buckled down and RTFM.

RTFM now, so you still have someone to help you later.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Whenever you get the temptation to say "RTFM", you'd better make a mental note to actually do the same, and see if the advice is sane for a new user.

The problem with RTFM is quite simple: Sometimes TFM really is a F#@$ manual, and not the Fine manual that is expected or needed.

Being a local 'Google', I can tell you that more often than not, the issues I hear about are when the manual is incorrect, has dual meanings (neither of which is correct), or completely misleading. 90% of my frustration is because TFM is "The F#@%@#! manual, and not the fine manual.

The manual often makes sense to those familiar with the software, but not to those who are new to it, which is a related problem.

I outgrew my RTFM phase when I realized how terrible TFM usually is, and how resilient most manuals are to improvement.

RTFM would be a whole lot more valid if the manual was actually worth something; instead of the hastily scribbled, poorly worded, ambiguously phrased, steaming pile of failure that new users struggle with.
Calvin Spealman said…
Well this is a Python centric blog, but maybe I should have been more specific, anyway. The official Python documentation and the official tutorial are what I refer to, and they are excellent examples of good documentation. I'm drawing from this all the times people ask very basic language issues that are plainly covered in the tutorial, such as how to append to a list or what a dictionary is. Yes, I understand there are a luck of bad documentation examples out there, but I'm refering to a great one.
Paddy3118 said…
I agree with your sentiment, and the tone of the post. I just hate the acronym RTFM. I'm afraid that I always see it as 'Read The Lucking Manual' (that is Luck with an f). If I read such a reply I think the tone may be too aggressive or at least ambiguous, as read the Fine Manual is a distant second interpretation to me.
I think it is best for the helper to spell out what he thinks the reader should do to avoid any confusion.

- Paddy.

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro