Does This Free Software Come with .docs?

Of course, with free software, there's free documentation ”see www.linuxdoc.org and httpd.apache.org/docs/, to name two. The ultimate documentation, the source code, is available to anyone . (Thus the Open Source joke, "Use the source, Luke!") Because of the large community of developers and users, there are many newsgroups and discussion forums in which it is likely that someone else has had the same problem as you and has posted a solution. Search using Google (www.google.com) and its interface to the Usenet archive (groups.google.com).

If you've installed Linux from a distribution, much of the documentation is likely sitting on your hard drive. In an ideal world, you would just read it ”that's what we did. Excellent resource though it is, it leaves something to be desired as a learning method. Much of it was written for reference, not instruction. Some of the documentation has not been updated along with the software. (Hey, these folks work for free. In any case, this is a problem to which closed-source software is not immune.)