Documentation & Books

Judy Perry jperryl at ecs.fullerton.edu
Sat Jul 3 15:56:06 EDT 2004


Novice programmers can't be expected to 'dig for diamonds' because they
(a) don't know how to dig, (b) don't know what to dig with or for, and (c)
don't know how to ask relevant questions.

But with HC's UI and documentation (with indices) and Danny Goodman's
book (with an index), many learned successful digging techniques.

Of course  your book cannot be all things to all people, but when person
after person comes to the list saying that what they really want/need is
something along the lines of Danny Goodman's book, well, perhaps they are
indicating that there is a need along those lines as well as what you are
doing.

Heck, I suspect that there's even a need for something on Rev along the
lines of "Hypercard in a Hurry"... @;-)

Judy


On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, Dan Shafer wrote:
> 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.



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