Documentation & Books

[Dan Shafer]

On Jul 2, 2004, at 2:44 PM, Marian Petrides wrote:

> Dan's book helps but it isn't sufficient--and doesn't look like it 
> will be, even when all 3 volumes are finished.  Using the standalone 
> builder as an example, Dan takes you through the most important items 
> in it just fine, but does not help define the more cryptic elements.

Marian......

Pretty harsh judgement based on not having most of the manuscript in 
publication yet.

One has to begin somewhere. If I wrote a complete, all-topics, 
no-holds-barred, detailed chapter on the Standalone Builder, it'd be 50 
or more pages long, and a big chunk of it would be of little or no 
interest to 90% of Rev users. Esoterica is stuff a programmer expects 
to learn on his or her own, with help from the community and tech 
support. No book can cover all details of *any* aspect of the product.

BTW, and FWIW, this whole dialog about the lack of usefulness of the 
documentation is pretty absurd to someone like me who has learned a 
dozen programming languages over the years without a formal degree in 
CS or any deep professional training. These docs are amazingly 
thorough. It may take a while to find stuff in them but I've had to 
deal with programming tools my whole career where the only reason it 
was hard to find something is because it wasn't there. The recipes and 
how-to's that were added to the last rev of these docs are amazingly 
helpful.

I don't' mean to be harsh but maybe the problem is that some of us 
expect to find the answers lying around on the ground. You gotta dig 
for diamonds, folks.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Revolutionary
Author of  "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
http://www.revolutionpros.com for more info
Available at Runtime Revolution Store (http://www.runrev.com/RevPress)