The Documentation

[Gregory Lypny]

Light and parsimonious are too different things.  The HyperCard books  
are big because they are fairly exhaustive, but the exposition is  
tight with well-chosen yet relatively simple examples that encourage  
you to think of other uses for the commands and functions.   
Mathematica has made some progress in that the newest version has a  
built-in Documentation Centre that provides increasingly technical  
material only incrementally.  A search for something will give you  
just its definition or function and syntax; dig a little more and you  
get basic examples; then you can click "reveal" triangles to get  
scope, generalizations and extensions, options, applications,  
properties, and finally crazy rocket scientist examples.  It's a  
welcome change to a program that has steep learning curve.

Regards,

	Gregory



On Fri, Oct 26, 2007, at 1:00 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com 
  wrote:

> I agree with Gregory. I loved the Hypercard documentation: clear,
> well-organized, concise, nice examples. I'm looking at the Hypercard  
> Script
> Language Guide right now. It's 583 pages. I wouldn't call that skimpy.
>
> -- 
> Regards,
>
> Howard Bornstein
> -----------------------
> www.designeq.com - Hide quoted text -
>
>
> On 10/25/07, Stephen Barncard <stephenREVOLUTION2 at barncard.com> wrote:
>>
>> The original manuals were more than skimpy.
>>
>> I think you mean the Winkler and Shafer books.
>>
>>
>>> The original HyperCard manuals are hard to beat for parsimony,
>>> elegance, and darn good writing in my opinion.
>>>
>>>      Gregory
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>> stephen barncard
>> s a n  f r a n c i s c o
>