Myllyn WikiText - Edit documentation easily for different formats

I just discovered that there is in the Eclipse Galileo a very easy and simple way to edit documentation called Wikitext. Documentation for this can be found in the eclipse documentation. Try it. It is just great.

It is in that way possible to use a WikiText format (out of a choice of 3 or 4 different one to write documentation. This Wikitext cabn be then used to generate html or docbook format. This is therefore very useful to create documentation.

See more at http://help.eclipse.org/galileo/topic/org.eclipse.mylyn.wikitext.help.ui/help/Mylyn%20WikiText%20User%20Guide.html

A central Linux Documentation page

As I was looking for a way to submit a patch to the documentation of the kernel about the i386 --> x86 as well as x86_64 change, I came on to an article about the linux documentation, which gave a pointer on the work of Rob Landley at kernel.org/doc. I may take a look at what could be missing tomorrow.

Useful appendices :-)

I have been reading this book, an excellent book on linux: Wolfgang Mauerer. Linux Kernelarchitektur Konzepte, Strukturen und Algorithmen von Kernel 2.6, Hanser 2004. ISBN 3-446-22566-8 Some of the information I write from this blog have been largely adapted or influenced through the reading of the book. A very useful thing is also, that the book has a web site, with PDF version of the appendices which are not in the book. It is a bit strange but still extremely useful. The book is in german, therefore it will not be useful for everybody.

• remarks on C
• booting of the linux kernel
• ELF binary format
• architectures specific topics
• links on how to work with the source code

There is also a list of useful Documentation links: http://www.linux-kernel.de/docs/index.html. In particular:

• Online Documents about Kernel
• important RFCs (TCP/IP..., Differentiated Services fields)
• GNU tool information
• ELF format
• important documentation from the kernel

So I've got to say this is really a wonderful book on linux. I just happened to learn from the author that he is writing a new, more current version of the book.

Linux Kernel Mailing List FAQ

One page I had not noticed, and which seems to contain lots of interesting features: the Linux Kernel Mailing List FAQ. There are some nice infos for newbies... But not so much information except a lot of very nice pointers to different useful places.

Online C++ Documentation

I found a nice page as a C++ documentation: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/.

C library

A number of headers are present in the standard C++ library, for example:

• asserts
• types
• errors
• floats
• Standard definitions
• localization
• limits of standard types
• maths
• C I/O library functions
• C strings
• C time
• C standard libraries
• Jump routines to preserve calling properties and environment ***
• and handling of variable arguments

I/O Streams

There is a number of headers existing for the C++ stream operations as well as a number of possible classes for all these headers information. The main reference page has a nice picture summarizing the relationship between these classes.

string header

The string headers is useful to represent characters sequence. It contains a number of operations which are described on a special page for the string operation topics. A nice aspect is also that these pages have examples. So it's quite nice to learn how to use them correctly.

Standard Template Libraries

One of the nice aspect of this page was for example the page on the Standard Template Library. It presents all the complexities of the different operation on the diverese containers which can be used with these structures. Dividing the different containers in three groups: sequence containers, container adapters and associative containers.

<algorithm>

But there is also one I was not aware of: the algorithm header, which provides a number of standard algorithms which are designed to work on ranges of elements. For example, it contains search, merge, sorting, heap, min/max as well as operation to modify sequences and structures (swapping, copying, partitioning).

Supplementary headers

There are 4 other headers which do not belong to the other above categories:

• functional
• iterator
• memory
• utility