You can learn a lot by searching the web, so many folks don't learn something new by reading the first chapter of any intro to Unix (or the shell) book anymore.

You can learn a lot by searching the web, so many folks don't learn something new by reading the first chapter of any intro to Unix (or the shell) book anymore. It's still surprising though. If you search for help with command line utils you are almost guaranteed to get some results that are man pages online, so the person who said that probably has read man pages without realizing it, and without the convenience of the man program.