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-Mubeena asked:
-What is the difference between a reference manual and a user's guide? I am a
How 'bout an extreme, quick and dirty analogy?
A reference guide is to a user guide like a dictionary is to a an essay.
People look things up in a non-linear fashion in a dictionary. They don't start at aardvark, read for a few hours, put in a bookmark, pick it up again and continuing until they finish the zzzzz's. Reference guides are bone-chilling objective in nature.
An essay, however, is read from the start to the finish in a linear fashion. You have to read the previous paragraph to fully understand the current paragraph. You can't jump in just anywhere. And it is not designed to look stuff up in. Essays can be wanderingly subjective.
Now the analogy is not as extreme in the case of reference and user guides. Readers can approach reference guides in a linear fashion. Especially geeks. But they are primarily designed to be used in a look-up-a-factoid-quick approach. And information in user guides is often systematically and hierarchally chunked into bite-sized morsels that can be jumped to from the table of contents, or even by skimming section headings.
Another difference is that reference guides explain more of what something is and how IT works. A user guide describes how the reader (or user) uh, uses it. Usually starting with the first tasks a user would do, such as installing it.
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