Scripts in Independent Study Tutorial - A Mini-Course

[Richard Gaskin]

Dan Shafer wrote:

> My apologies to Richard and Jeanne, but this gave me another chance to
> tout how really, really, REALLY useful studying this stack would be to
> anyone who's just past the beginning stage of scripting and wants to
> see how to put together an actual application from a scripting
> perspective. Very good stuff.

Thank you for the kind words, Dan.  I'm a big fan of "learning through
dissection", having learned most of what I know from code examples of
others.  So after the main tutorials were out of the way I proposed the
Independent Study as a way of showing how all the parts fit together.
Jeanne's examples throughout the Transcript Dictionary provide a very
valuable context, but seeing how such things come together in a functional
application provide a whole different level of context and introduces
structure, something that focusing on the language alone can't provide.

Thus far I believe you're the first person to have commented on the
Independent Study tutorial -- thanks for posting that.

> ...in his comments on these scripts, a very good mini-tutorial in
> how application-level stuff works and ought to be put together in
> Revolution. The comments are extensive, lucid, and really helpful.

More extensive than I deliver for most clients, but as with any comments you
gotta keep the audience in mind. :)

For the most part I followed Steve McConnel's approach of writing my
comments first to tell the story of the program flow, then went back to
write the code to make it happen.

> Somehow, they need to be more "in your face" for new developers.
> Perhaps publishing the scripts and comments as a separate piece of
> documentation to be read? I don't know. But I'll tell you they were
> really, really valuable.

I keep thinking there's got to be a way to do that without losing the
in-program context which provides additional learning value.  In my
imagination there's a tool called Scalpel which aids in learning by
dissection, but I haven't yet figured out how to design it.  Any
suggestions?

One thing that might be useful is an article on best practices for object
structure as a compliment to the Scripting Style Guide at
<http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/scriptstyle.html>.  Having
already made many mistakes over the years*, I could hopefully jot down what
I've found works well so others could avoid wasting time making the same
mistakes I've made.

* MetaCard guru Phil Davis once told me: "Good judgement comes from
experience.  Experience comes from bad judgement."  ;)

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
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 Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site
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