Why Rev needs a cookbook (newb questions)

[Peter Alcibiades]

Someone suggested entering 'empty' into the dictionary.  Try it.  You get
30-40 entries, with 'empty' as a property, and one with it as a constant,
and two with it as an option on commands.  One of these may or may not tell
you how to set a variable to empty.

This is a bit like setting out to make spaghetti carbonara, and discovering
that you can look up spaghetti in the manual.  There are lots of entries for
the diferent sorts of spaghetti, thick, thin, fresh, wholewheat...  You look
up bacon.  Lots of entries, back, streaky, smoked, pancetta.....  What you
need is a book organised by Things You Want to Make.  Carbonara, Bolognese,
Cheese.   Broccoli and achovies, Putanesca...   I am getting hungry thinking
about it.

So similarly what Rev needs is a book which does not, when you look up
'empty' have all those 40-50 entries.  Instead it has some along the lines
of 'How to empty a variable, field.....'.

Carla's book is a model.  Here is her table of contents

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006402/toc.html?CMP=ILL-4GV796923290

And here is an excerpt to show exactly how it works:

Problem

You need to know what files are installed on your system when you install a
program from source code, so that you can find and remove all of them if you
decide you don't want them anymore. Some program authors thoughtfully
include a "make uninstall" target to perform a clean uninstall, but many do
not.

Solution

You can use standard Linux utilities to generate a pre-installation list of
all files on your system. Then generate a post-installation list, and diff
the two lists to make a list of newly-installed files. This example uses
JOE: Joe's Own Editor:

# find / | grep -v -e ^/proc/ -e ^/tmp/ -e ^/dev/ > joe-preinstall.list

Compile and install your new program, then generate the post-installation
list:

# find / | grep -v -e ^/proc/ -e ^/tmp/ -e ^/dev/ > joe-postinstall.list

Then create a list of files installed by Joe by diffing the two lists:

$ diff joe-preinstall.list joe-postinstall.list > joe-installed.list

There are a few more examples here:

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/excerpt/lnxckbk_1/index.html

Its all organized along the lines of, you are engaged in doing something and
find you would like to do X,   This is how to do it.  Sometimes (as in this
case) there is a discussion (here omitted) afterwards about how it works and
what to be careful of.

You can see, its a dictionary, but organized by problems which in turn are
all grouped under tasks.  You need both kinds.  I am not criticizing the Rev
materials, which are (a) much improved and (b) excellent as what they are. 
But you do need both.  Especially for those starting out with it.  My own
example was a problem which Jim Ault was kind enough to show me how to
manage, using 'filter'.  Filter was there in the dictionary all the time,
I'd just not realized that this was what you used or how you used it to
solve my problem.  But had there been an entry on the lines of, how to
eliminate dupes, or some ways of doing lookups and matches, it would have
been in there.

It would be natural to get contributions in the form of a wiki, and then
have someone edit them into a structure.   Most of the material is probably
around somewhere, just not organized like this.
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