The GAP manual is distributed in various ``books''. The standard distribution contains four of them (as well as a comprehensive index). Share packages and other extensions may provide their own manuals.
All documentation will be available automatically for the online help
(see Help). There also is (if installed) an HTML version in the doc/htm
subdirectory that can be viewed with an HTML browser. Note that you need to
set up the symbol font properly in your web browser to get a correct
display of mathematical formulae (see section HTML Font Setup).
Typing ?topic after the gap> prompt will display the manual section
about topic (or offer you a list of sections that fit), ??topic will
list all sections in whose title topic occurs.
Unless you only downloaded a rudimentary distribution, there will be already
dvi and pdf files for the manual books provided with the standard
distribution. You find these in the directory
gap4r2/doc in the subdirectories tut (a beginner's tutorial),
ref (the reference manual), prg (programmer's tutorial) and ext
(programmer's reference).
If you do not yet have a viewer for pdf files, you can take for example
Adobe Acrobat
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html (a copyrighted, but
free program) or XPDF
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/xpdf.html (a free program under GPL).
As a complete beginner, we suggest you read the tutorial first for an introduction to GAP4.
If you have experience with GAP3, it might be still worth to at least glance over the first chapters of the tutorial. You however should read the last chapter of the tutorial, ``Migrating to GAP4''. This chapter gives a summary of changes between GAP3 and GAP4 that will affect the user. It also explains a ``compatibility mode'' you may turn on to make GAP4 behave a bit more like GAP3.
As some of the manuals are quite large you should not immediately print
them. If you start using GAP it will be helpful to print the tutorial (and
probably the first chapters of the reference manual).
There is no compelling reason to print the whole of the reference manual.
We also recommend to print the full index to the manuals to be found in
gap4r2/doc/fullindex.dvi.
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GAP 4 manual