Documentation & Books

[Richard Gaskin]

Beat Cornaz wrote:
 >
 > I've been working with Revolution now for a little
 > while and I'm struck by the lack of documentation,
 > or better the lack of good documentation. The
 > supplied docs with revolution , I think are
 > totally inadequate.

Given the range of personalities and experience levels Rev appeals to, I 
would agree that the docs currently address only a subset of them.

One of the toughest challenges in training is identifying where your 
audience is coming from, and then tailoring the materials to fit their 
needs.  This was frequently cited in feedback from the Rev seminar at 
MacWorld, that as a first conference it offered only one track but with 
so many different types of developers there inevitably there was some 
material that was moving too quickly for newcomers and too slowly for 
the pros.  The Monterey conference addresses this by focusing 
exclusively on one subset, professional developers, and hopefully the 
next RunRev-sponsored conference will have multiple tracks.

In a perfect world documentation could also have some form of multiple 
tracks, and we see at least a beginning effort in this direction on the 
front card of the Help stacks that invites you to select from choices 
that identify your background (the "Which describes you best?" options).

But it could go a lot farther, given a little insight and a lot of sweat 
(pun intended, Monte <g>). You can lend a hand on the insight side of 
things:

- What sort of software are you building, or would like to build, in Rev?

- Have you built software before?  If so, with what tools/languages?

- Which operating systems do you currently use regularly, and which ones 
do you plan to deploy to?

- Aside from email and a browser, what are the three applications you 
use most often, or are most familiar with?

- What was it about Rev that attracted you?

- Do you find some portions of the documentation better suited for you 
than others?  If so, which ones are working for you?

If you don't feel like sharing that information with the list I'm sure 
you could send it to heather at runrev.com and she'll forward it to the 
documentation team.  Feedback like that will be very helpful for them in 
getting a deeper understanding of the audience.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more:  http://www.fourthworld.com/rev