Documentation & Books

Marian Petrides mpetrides at earthlink.net
Wed Jul 7 15:04:19 EDT 2004


Likewise there is lots of information in the dox about reading and 
writing to disk, but if all you want is to get started with very simple 
file I/O, you need to have Dan's book--in which there are some nice, 
basic examples.

With this information, you can then go back to the Rev Transcript 
Dictionary and see that they do, in fact, tell you how to read from a 
file until a specific string (eg, tab) is found.   BUT if you simply 
read the entry for "read from file" it's pretty easy to miss the 
information you need--especially if you are reading from the online (by 
which I mean built-in) dox.

And, if you try to get the information from the tutorials (unless I 
missed something), the information presented in the Advanced Study 
tutorial isn't really a tutorial (as in, "if I follow these steps, I 
will eventually end up with an employee database) but rather more like 
a partial dissection of the stack. Likewise (again, unless I am missing 
something) the how-to recipes don't include this either.

My point is that, at this juncture, a little more attention to putting 
forward simple step-by-step instructions for basic functions would go a 
long way in alleviating the frustration of beginners and even advanced 
beginner/intermediate users. And, for Rev, to progress to its rightful 
place, it needs not only to appeal to the niche of experienced 
professional developers but also to wannabees who may not yet have the 
patience to spend hours trying to figure out where the one kernel of 
information is located.

M





On Jul 7, 2004, at 2:38 PM, Mark Wieder wrote:

> Richard-
>
> Wednesday, July 7, 2004, 8:23:43 AM, you wrote:
>
> RG> A majority of the items reported here as MIA can be found with the
> RG> Search Documentation tool using common terminology to describe 
> them.
> RG> Note that I didn't say "all", but cutting the number of unanswered
> RG> questions by more than half in one move isn't bad.
>
> Another good example is the use of arrays in rev. This is a topic
> which is quite confusing and looking in the documentation for the word
> "array" comes up with nothing. Running the search tool comes up with
> more, but there's no apparent link from the dictionary to the search
> tool, and no indication that the search tool might come up with more
> information.
>
> -- 
> -Mark Wieder
>  mwieder at ahsoftware.net
>
> _______________________________________________
> use-revolution mailing list
> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>



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