Documentation & Books

[Chipp Walters]

Can't help if you don't read the dox... In fact, programming 
environments are not multimedia interfaces, or teller machines-- which 
have been designed specifically for ease of first time learning and not 
ease of use. You should see the help file which Microsoft gives you for 
Visual InterDev. It's even harder to navigage and find anything of 
help/interest.

That being said, I *know* Kevin is particularly tuned to just the 
problems you describe and is focussed on making the learning experience 
easier for newbies. I think 2.3 will take a giant step in this direction.

Y'know, when I started using Rev, everything I learned which I thought 
important to me, I posted on my website at:
http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/RunRev/default.htm

Over time, it has grown quite large, and is certainly not the easiest 
site to navigate for content. But, I did it hoping others would be 
helped by finding solutions there to some of the same problems they were 
having.

That was my constructive approach to this problem.

I know it's somewhat frustrating, but consider this:

A few years ago, I wanted to start writing a simple web app which would 
validate a username and password against a server. You all have seen it 
before.

This should be simple, right? Well, let's see. Here are the various 
languages and products I had to learn before I could do any of it.

I needed to be able to install and configure an IIS web server.
I needed to be able to install and configure a SQL server database.
I needed to be able to create tables and schema for the database.

Then I must learn all about ODBC and how to connect to a database from a 
client development machine. I also need to learn all about access 
control lists and workgroups as well as the IIS security model.

Next, install a development IDE so I can script .asp code and vbScript. 
But, then of course I need to obviously know all about HTML, CSS, 
Javascript (client-side validation) as well as SQL. These are all 
different languages.

I need to be able to define recordsets using one of the different .asp 
COM connector object libraries (of which there were a few at the time, 
who knows which one to use?). Next I needed to learn about the 
systemFileObject as I wanted to save a file on the server. More security 
stuff and environment variables I had never heard of. I had to purchase 
an extra COM object to do this. It keeps getting worse.... and there 
were no books which explained it all. You had to find the proverbial 
'diamonds in the haystack.' Now *this* was frustrating! -- but I did 
eventually figure it out.

Imagine my relief when I stumbled onto RunRev. Of course the language is 
large, but it is understandable, and findable. I could submerse myself 
and still find some light at the end of the tunnel:-)

-Chipp

Marian Petrides wrote:

> Ah, but what about the hapless person (I certainly have been there) who 
> wanders around for a while doing whatever, stumbles on the dictionary 
> listing, sees a search box and uses it.  How is that person going to 
> know (unless he remembers having seen it) that