Ubuntu – get man pages without installing the corresponding packages

First reinstall the man-db package, which contains the basic manual infrastructure

sudo apt-get install --reinstall man-db

Then if an individual man page is missing, reinstall the package of the program in question, which should also contain the man pages. For ls, the package is coreutils.

Manual pages are essentially glorified help files. Their goal is to explain what programs do, and how to alter what they do through command-line flags and arguments.

If you look at the SYNOPSIS and OPTIONS sections of manpages, you will typically be able to understand enough about what your program does.

Don't allow the "technical" wording of manpages to throw you off -- they were typically written by developers in a developer mindset. The more you read/use them, the better you'll get and the more you'll develop your own tricks to using man.

If you press the h key in man, you can get a lot of useful keyboard shortcuts (and general help) that will make your browsing (hopefully) faster. They're similar to the keystrokes for less, so it's essentially a 2-for-1.

And, you can always refer to the manpage for man (man man) to get a quick rundown of man. You can't break man too badly, so just feel free to experiment and try out things.