Consider a situation where we want to create a link in /tmp that points to /usr/local/bin. Should we type this:

$ ln -s /usr/local/bin bin1
$ ls -l bin1
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           14 Jan  1 15:42 bin1 -> /usr/local/bin

Or alternatively:

$ ln -s ../usr/local/bin bin2
$ ls -l bin2
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           16 Jan  1 15:43 bin2 -> ../usr/local/bin