A method of creating a peripheral driver for a particular peripheral by learning the peripheral options and the commands for those options from the peripheral itself. The computer access a specified location in the memory of the peripheral which contains either a generic peripheral description file or a pointer to such a file. The file is a text-based file, which contains the peripheral options as name-value entries. The computer parses the file and learns of the available options and the appropriate commands to use those options. The computer is thus able to create a driver for the peripheral.