Well, to be fair, you also had W. Richard Stevens if the guy sitting next to you behaved like a certain bodily orifice, or if the man pages were either too dens

Well, to be fair, you also had W. Richard Stevens if the guy sitting next to you behaved like a certain bodily orifice, or if the man pages were either too dense or too sparse. The key was to be able to read source and build a mental model of the system you were working on. That usually took a few months to a year depending on the system.