It is usually the case that the most commonly used terms are those which are harder to define. Hence, the word advice and the action advice are conversation regulars that fall under those categories that people do not define. Simply put, it is hard to categorize an advice because it is very broad and it seems to be more academic than practical because almost everyone understands what an advice is. But to give us a working definition of the word advice, it is sufficient to say that to advice is to offer a possible suggestion, whether solicited or unsolicited. Now, the word suggestion might seem to be synonymous to the term advice itself, but then again, this is just an attempt to concretize what is otherwise a broad term.

This definition limits that not everything uttered is a piece of advice. Some smart ones can excuse themselves of saying a faulty advice by claiming that what they said is just a point of view. What is a point of view? A point of view is merely one’s opinion on a certain matter. It differentiates from advice as a point of view does not offer anything. It may influence a person from doing certain acts or in believing into certain things, but such is not the direct objective of a point of view; whereas an advice is intended to somehow exert influence on one’s actions or way of thinking.

An advice is also starkly different from a command. A command will always impose not just influence but control. Hence, when a general commands a private to fire the armalite, the general is not giving an advice on how to kill the enemy; rather, the general is imposing that the private must and should fire the armalite to the enemy. There is no other recourse than to really pull the trigger.

Hence, if a spectrum should depict advice versus point of view and command, the scale would follow this sequence based on the level of influence objectively sought: point of view, followed by advice and lastly by command. Note that the degrees of how one’s action is governed by these three concepts are not exactly equally divided. There are other circumstances that must be accounted for. What is however clear is that these three are different from one another; and for purposes of discussion, we are concentrating on advice.

To stress, an advice is a suggestion offered which aims to direct one’s action or influence one’s way of thinking. A lot of things can fall under advice. Advice does not only cover advice columns or helpdesks. It is a lot of things; and as mentioned, with five hundred ninety-four million hits, the concept of advice is too difficult to ignore. Thus, there is a need to somehow understand its many forms and varieties. Specifically, we need to know the types of advice out there, the sources of advice and the methodologies of receiving and giving an advice. After all, the key to saying anything, including advice, requires thorough understanding to avoid possible adverse effects. A word is difficult to swallow once it slips past a person’s lips.
Types of Advice

Since it is imperative that one must advise properly, there is a need to have the skill of knowing what type of advice one renders. The key delineation of these types of advice lies in the audience or recipients of the advise.

Answered by Ashish Yadav , an ibibo Wizard, at 8:10 PM on December 09, 2008

In aspect and functional programming, advice describes a class of functions which modify other functions when the latter are run; it is a certain function, method or procedure that is to be applied at a given join point of a program.

The following is taken from a discussion at the mailing list aosd-discuss. Pascal Costanza contributed the following:

The term advice goes back to the term advising as introduced by Warren Teitelman in his PhD thesis in 1966. Here is a quote from Chapter 3 of his thesis:

Advising is the basic innovation in the model, and in the PILOT system. Advising consists of inserting new procedures at any or all of the entry or exit points to a particular procedure (or class of procedures). The procedures inserted are called "advice procedures" or simply "advice".
Since each piece of advice is itself a procedure, it has its own entries and exits. In particular, this means that the execution of advice can cause the procedure that it modifies to be bypassed completely, e.g., by specifying as an exit from the advice one of the exits from the original procedure; or the advice may change essential variables and continue with the computation so that the original procedure is executed, but with modified variables. Finally, the advice may not alter the execution or affect the original procedure at all, e.g., it may merely perform some additional computation such as printing a message or recording history. Since advice can be conditional, the decision as to what is to be done can depend on the results of the computation up to that point.
The principal advantage of advising is that the user need not be concerned about the details of the actual changes in his program, nor the internal representation of advice. He can treat the procedure to be advised _as a unit_, a single block, and make changes to it without concern for the particulars of this block. This may be contrasted with editing in which the programmer must be cognizant of the internal structure of the procedure.
"Advising" found its way into BBN Lisp and later into Xerox PARC's Interlisp.

It also found its way to Flavors, the first object-oriented extension to Lisp developed at MIT. They were subsumed under the notion of method combination. See, for example, AIM-602 at http://www.ai.mit.edu/research/publ ications/browse/0600browse.shtml 1

Answered by BAGYALAKSHMI , an ibibo Advisor, at 4:34 PM on December 09, 2008

Written confirmation of payment received, funds transferred, service performed, or payment made. Examples in banking include a credit advice, indicating a debit advice, a withdrawal or transfer, and an account service charge.

Answered by ayisha , an ibibo Master, at 11:17 PM on December 08, 2008

Advice is the implementation of an aspect. It is something like telling your application of a new behavior. Generally, and advice is inserted into an application at joinpoints.

Answered by Yuvee , an ibibo Master, at 10:19 PM on December 08, 2008