With due respect to the Linux community, they do not promote good hygiene by publishing less than comprehensible manpages (possibly an unintended consequence of Linux itself being a kernel only...). This is why the culture lives & breathes on third-party howto documents. This is further complicated by the fact there is no community body which oversees the completeness nor quality of such documents, nor can there be. So buyer, beware. Maybe the documentation which is dredged up is correct; maybe it isn't.
The BSD community (ie. project developers...) puts great effort into ensuring that the manpages are up-to-date, correct, &readable. They should be the first place users search, & users unfamiliar with the subjectt matter should still compare any outside documentation to this gold standard.
The second source of truth users should consider is the FAQ's published by each of the projects.
Unfortunately, those of us who answer questions here regularly deal with issues where the research done is either non-existent, incomplete, or based on how-to documents found in the wild which have not been vetted by anyone other than the original author. We end up mopping up the mess afterwards for those who stopped at these documents thinking they found a shortcut. They didn't.
Unix is a powerful & flexible environment which in its transparency provides lots of knobs for tuning, but knowing how to tune takes knowledge, experience, tenacity, & the willingness to research. Howto documents can be used as preliminary information, but manpages speak the truth. Become a responsible administrator to your own systems by integrating their use throughout the research process & daily usage.
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