You seem to have missed my point. If you don't have a certain amount of base knowledge, you will have a very hard time reading and understanding the often terse and poorly written man/info pages, and googling around when you can't tell the difference between a correct answer and an incompetent, dangerous answer is very difficult as well
Being a newbie is hard
Agreed ;) Hello, my name is Steve, and I'm a newbie (despite a couple years playing around with Linux in various forms). Different people learn in different manners. In the company I work for, our programmers write the end-user documentation (don't ANYONE ask why- I've mentioned it's a dumb practice 100 times!) Their docs to a web-mail reader the customers use talks about using regular expressions when setting up mail filters. NO simple wild-carding is supported (which might possibly be an end user concept). Needless to say, our customers try to use the webmail filtering, and they ALWAYS call tech support. A lot of Linux documentation seems to be like that - They often expect a certain base knowledge that makes even a simple subject difficult if you don't know where to find the other knowledge.