Hi John,
Personally I think that each person is trying to get started in their own way. For programmers Sax and Dom are newbie activities. For others it might not be. I would be happy to help you with the newbie activities you are interested in. I had to look up Tamagotchi to know what it was, but it looks pretty interesting.
How far did you get writing your own Etoy Tamagotchi's? It would seem to me that Squeak and EToy's is a perfect platform for such an activity. I could point you to programming resources, or even Etoy resource, but not really knowing what you are looking for it's difficult to do. I don't know what you have already read or what getting started stuff you have tried. Have you already seen www.squeakland.org . There are some more advanced projects there. Also it would help to understand what level you are trying for. Are you looking to do programming, or sticking with Etoy scripts?
My feelings about the list so far is that there is much more bandwidth available then is being used. It doesn't seem to me that questions from a beginner programmer should be booted from the newbie list. What I would like to see are more simple questions so that everyone can get what they are looking for. So if you have a simple question like how can I get my Tamagotchi to act hungry when it's not fed, that would be cool. (Or even how can I turn my Tamagotchi green when it's fed too much!)
Happy coding!
Ron Teitelbaum President / Principal Software Engineer US Medical Record Specialists Ron@USMedRec.com
From: John Kershaw Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2006 4:53 AM Hi all,
As a newcomer to Squeak/eToys I've been searching for info on helping my 9-11 year olds write 'Tamagotchi' style simulations, since I've been unable to find a straight-forward manual. There's lots of 'Getting started' materials, but nothing on getting to the next level.
I signed up this 'Newbies' list but, to be honest, does parsing XMLs using the SAX or DOM models really fit into that category?
Can someone point me to resources for real (3-4 weeks experience) newbies?
John.
On 30/06/06, Ron Teitelbaum Ron@usmedrec.com wrote:
Cédrick,
The basic difference between SAX and DOM is that SAX is like a stream
that
as it is read provides information to you to build the objects you need, while DOM is more like a tree or object model that can be traversed like regular objects. They both have their advantages. The big advantage
for
SAX is in parsing large files. Since it acts like a stream you can
build
objects on the fly and not have to parse the entire file before getting
a
single object. DOM is much easier to use since it builds a tree for you that can be traversed.
For DOM to create an object you need to build your own object form the
data
that each node of the tree provides to you. The tree is a collection of collections with each item an XMLElement that can respond with queries
like
elementAt: #... you can iterate over the collection creating objects as
you
go.
For Sax you wait for a tag that indicates starting a new object then you create the object and for each element that comes after you add data to
your
object until you hit the end object tag.
If you are going to XML then you should learn both (which it seems you
are
doing). Good luck with it and feel free to let us know how you are
doing
with it. If you need more help let us know.
Ron Teitelbaum President / Principal Software Engineer US Medical Record Specialists Ron@USMedRec.com
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