HOWTO article

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A HOWTO Article, often called just a HOWTO, is an article that explains how to use software. While HOWTOs are in many ways tutorials for a specific task, they are not just tutorials as they tend to be much more in-depth, explaining some level of theory along the way, and in that a reader of a well-written HOWTO is more likely to glean some sort of general knowledge about the software in question. Furthermore, a HOWTO often assumes a higher level of basic knowledge on the topic in question.

There are many sources for HOWTO articles, one of the most famous being the Linux Documentation Project, a project to document features of Linux and GNU software.

Contents 1 Physical Publishing of HOWTO Articles 2 HOWTO Articles on the web 3 Funny HOWTO Articles 4 See also 5 External links

[edit] Physical Publishing of HOWTO Articles

Some HOWTOs have also been published in book-form by O'Reilly, like Olaf Kirch's Linux network admin HOWTO, and NET-HOWTO. The fact that the information is freely availvable online has not stopped the sale of the book-form.

Red Hat published a book entitled Doctor Linux that consisted entirely of HOWTOs available under free licenses, most of which was available under the GFDL. The book was popular enough that Red Hat made a profit from the sale of the book. ^{[citation needed]}

[edit] HOWTO Articles on the web

• The Linux Documentation Project HOWTOs - documentation for the GNU/Linux operating system.
• Debian NewbieDOC Articles - Debian GNU/Linux documentation for newbies by newbies (and not-so-newbies).
• Linux.org HOWTOs - HOWTOs for Linux.
• Python HOWTOs - Documentation for Python coding.

[edit] Funny HOWTO Articles

Some HOWTO articles are written in an ironic sense, and document either non-existent procedures, or document procedures in a nonsensical and amusing fashion. Such articles are related in spirit to such projects as asr-manpages and funny-manpages.

[edit] See also

The Hacker's Dictionary

[edit] External links

• The Linux Documentation Project, a popular repository for HOWTO documents.