In addition to what other commenters have said -

man pages are nice references, but in a lot of cases they seem to be kind of obtuse. They'll have a short technically correct description of every individual flag, but not really what you'd use the flag for, or how it combines with other flags.

Most man pages need a lot more examples. I like blog posts like this, which are pretty example-driven. They lay out an actual use case, and then walk through the flags necessary to achieve that goal. A man page starts with the flags, and assumes you'll know when and why to use them.

FWIW, I think it can be helpful to discover features of tools in smaller chunks, in the context of a blog post. man pages can be very dry and it's not always easy to think of all the possible ways some particular flag could help you.

I'm not necessarily defending this particular post, just making a general point about the more esoteric features of something like ssh :)

You ever read the man pages for less?

Actually apparently it doesn't have a man page, I had to use less --help.

Anyways, it turns out there's a ton of functionality I never thought to look for. I only ever see "| less" and that's all it ever was to me. There's nothing more I really expected out of it than that, really.

But that's just how it goes, for the most part. You learn the basics about how to use a given tool, enough to serve the purpose you originally sought it out for, and then that's it, everything else is just noise. less lets me easily scroll through whatever output I pipe to it, ssh gets me onto another server, what more would I need or expect?

But then an article like this comes along and prompts me to look more closely at something I had been taking for granted, showing it to be much more versatile than I thought.

I guess not, since people decided to upvote!

Personally my favorite part is the logical the tie-in to Ansible, which I want to expand upon in a near-future edition.