[Newbies] Question / Thought about absence of any standard online help

[Michael van der Gulik]

itsme213 wrote:
> Is there some reason why the myriad tools in Squeak don't have even a 
> placeholder button or menu item for online help? From my newbies point of 
> view it is very frustrating to try to do something (refactor to extract a 
> method with a parameter, most recently) and be confronted with a totally new 
> editor (Selector editor, in this case) and not have any idea about what the 
> panels and buttons mean (Up? Down? Ok?). I finally figured it out, but it 
> took 15 minutes of blind trial and error. It is very disheartening and a 
> huge hurdle for someone who wants to get started with Squeak.
>
> Shouldn't online help be a standard part of any IDE framework, making it 
> easy for tool writers to add a few lines of online help in a standard way? 
> Perhaps include some url links? Heck, if the tool even had a standard link 
> (e.g. on SystemWindow) to a standard place on a Squeak wikis, anyone (even 
> me) could contribute to the help.
>
> And yes, I know that getting those lines written is a separate matter.
>   
Hello... umm... Itsme.

I've been using Squeak for a few years and I couldn't agree more.

There are documentation and tutorials at:

http://www.squeak.org/Documentation

This page is the "official" page containing links to Squeak
documentation. There are also books - the old Smalltalk books are still
largely relevant, and the tools are still used in the same way.

If you want to contribute, you can help with the documentation effort:
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2983

The community would also welcome code contributions, more documentation
and discussions on the Squeak mailing list about this. As a group of
volunteers, there's an endemic shortage of time to work on this sort of
thing so any help is appreciated. Online help from within the Squeak
environment would be very useful!

Gulik.