Electronic sources

Introductory tutorials

• emacs tutorial
  When you're new to emacs and find you're having problems, you may just want to go through the whole tutorial. This will also give you some idea of the more advanced capabilities of emacs that you may want to exploit more fully in the future. Get into emacs and type ESC-x help-with-tutorial.
  There's plenty more information about emacs available on-line - just type CTRL-h i or look at the manual on the web.
• UNIX tutorial
  On the elaines in Sweet Hall there's also a UNIX tutorial. To invoke it, just type learn.
  Among the topics available (files, editor, vi, morefiles, macros, and eqn, and C), I would recommend doing files and morefiles. Which of the other ones you want to do depends on your interests, but you probably won't need any of the contents in the near future. In particular, don't try to learn vi (an editor) unless you're sure that's what you want to do - emacs is much easier and can do everything you'll need to do.

Local help

• man pages
  There are extensive electronic manual pages for basically every command used on the UNIX systems. Just type man commandname to find out more about any command, for example about additional options. It is often quite easy to guess which command may have an option for what you want to do. For example, if you know that 'ls' lists files, and you want to list files in some special way, for example in reverse alphabetic order, it's a good bet that this will be one of the options for 'ls'. But if it isn't obvious or you don't know any command that might be doing what you want, you can search the man pages by keyword, by typing man -k topic.
• help pages
  On turing, there's also an extensive system of help pages. Just type help topic to see whether there is some information about your topic. You can see a list of all topics available by typing help alltopics.
  Recently, Emma made the help pages accessible via lynx as well - just type help and you'll be given a short introduction to the help system and will be able to follow links to the various topics.
  Here are some particularly useful help pages.
• e-mail to action
  If all these methods fail and you still have a problem, you can send e-mail to 'action@csli'. It will be read and dealt with by the local group of experts. You should read 'help action' for more information on how to do this most effectively.

Computing Web Pages at Stanford

• HelpSU
• The leland consulting page
• Computing Publications at Stanford (particularly useful: their alphabetic list of electronic versions of the Sweet Hall computing leaflets and other documents)
• The Portfolio Computing Page
• Stanford Technology and Computing Page
• The LAIR FAQ Page
• ITSS (Search ITSS)
• Academic Computing (Search RITS/Acomp)

Looking for help beyond Stanford

• Newsgroups
  There are some newsgroups which discuss computing problems. For example, problems with installing and running modem connections are discussed in 'su.computers.dialin'. The lists of FAQs (frequently asked questions) are often the most useful.
• Searching the web
  The Netscape search page has a good collection of search engines. Try Infoseek, Ultraseek, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite or HotBot. Or, even better, try Metacrawler or Savvy Search, which search several indices at once! Once you are looking at a potentially interesting page, you can search the contents of that page. How this is done exactly depends on your browser, but there should be a 'find' button or menu item somewhere. Also try out Yahoo, the best WWW Directory.
  Some examples of what you can find on the Web:
  • A good and extensive introduction to UNIX
  • Lots more information about UNIX
  • A comprehensive Emacs manual
  • nn FAQ

Electronic Sources of non-computing Information

• Emma's help pages also have information about non-computing issues
• The directory /user/linguistics on turing
  The file deptlist has the addresses of all faculty, staff, and students.
  The subdirectory Lists contains all the local linguistics mailing lists such as ling-grads and ling-dept (see the mailing list hierarchy)
  There are also files with the current schedule, called autumn.schedule, winter.schedule, or spring.schedule.
• folio
  To access folio, telnet to forsythetn, and type folio when asked for the account. You will also need to have a Stanford ID number and PIN. It contains many useful things, for example
  • socrates, Stanford's Library Catalog
  • axess, the administrative system which lets you register for your classes etc.
  • bookstore information - you can search which books they have and what they cost!
  • mla The MLA database of citations from Language and Linguistics journals, books, etc.
  • psycinfoThe PsycINFO database of citations and abstracts from Psychology journals
  To get to the main menu, type sel. Here's a guide to using folio.
• newsgroups
  You can use a newsreader, e.g. nn, to read any newsgroup you're interested in. Type help newsgroups-list for a list of all newsgroups currently available. (You can also look at the UUNET list of newsgroups, but of course we don't get them all here.) Or look at the List of FAQs (frequently asked questions) posted to newsgroups
• mailing lists
  You may want to get on some mailing lists, e.g. empiricists, HPSG, or LFG lists. Don't subscribe to the LINGUIST list however - you can read it in a local newsgroup (csli.linguistics.linguist) or on the web.
• The World Wide Web (WWW)
  • You can search the web for almost anything.
  • You can also search the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Stanford is a subscriber).
  • Also check out the Stanford Home Page, the Portfolio page and the Linguistics Department home page, which has lots of useful things, e.g. a list of courses. It also has a list of students with a short paragraph about their interests and links to their home pages. There's also an HTML version of the 1995 Little Red Book for Stanford Linguists.