Rant Re Rev Documentation

Thomas McGrath III 3mcgrath at adelphia.net
Mon Jul 25 00:54:18 EDT 2005


Tim,

I too disagree with your request/demand that the reference guide be a 
tutorial as well. It is just a reference guide. I do wish there were 
more than three examples especially for the more complex commands like 
send, etc.

I went through the built-in tutorials and then the scripting conference 
and it's stacks. I was told to pay special attention to the 'see also' 
section of the docs as that was very thorough and well thought out. I 
checked out many of the REV web ring sites and read through helpful 
hints. I then started to download as many user contributed stacks as 
possible that I could find even before the RevOnline User area was 
available. I have hundreds of sample stacks with very, very useful 
information in them and more efficient ways to code solutions.

Lastly when I got stuck on something I hit the list and right away got 
at least two possible solutions for every problem I have ever posted. 
More often it was three or four solutions. Plus there are a couple of 
revchat, wiki, and educational sites with so much info on them that I 
have yet to read them all yet.

I have never needed to use any of my 10 support incidents that were 
included in my Enterprise version of Rev. That says a lot about these 
available resources. They are very, very good. I could not find a tenth 
of them for Director and most that I did find were not free.

My fear is that a tutorial/guide that you refer too would be more 
database influenced and cgi based etc. and I do mostly graphical user 
interfaces and prototypes and have very little need for database type 
solutions.

I was very frustrated during the first month learning curve as well 
coming from Supercard but once background groups and object properties 
were explained I started to feel more comfortable then the wonderful 
people on this list started showing me how fast and powerful things 
like send to me in 50 milliseconds  and things like 'is among' I was on 
fire and only need help with my bad code habits and with 
misunderstanding syntax that may not have an example that fits what I 
am doing.

Hang in there Tim,

I know you'll be contributing and helping the next guy that comes alond.
On Jul 24, 2005, at 10:55 PM, Sarah Reichelt wrote:

> Hi Tim,
>
> I understand what you are saying but I'm not sure I agree with your 
> idea of the what the docs are for. I see them as a reference guide, 
> not a tutorial. For learning Revolution, you need other resources: the 
> built-in tutorials, the scripting conference stacks, Dan's book, this 
> list and the other resources available on the net.
> ogy, it is as if you are annoyed because a French dictionary is not 
> teaching you how to speak French :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Sarah




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