Bert Freudenberg a écrit :
> Am 16.01.2006 um 10:00 schrieb Marcus Denker:
> 
>> On 16.01.2006, at 09:21, Cees De Groot wrote:
>>
>>> On 1/16/06, joshscholar at nightstudies.net 
>>> <joshscholar at nightstudies.net> wrote:
>>>> Documentation, and it's lack is one of my pet peeves from my working 
>>>> life,
>>>> so forgive me my passion on this subject.  But perhaps I can say 
>>>> something
>>>> useful.
>>>>
>>> Yup, but please don't cut trees for it. Documentation in bookform
>>> (even electronic, like PDF) is all but unusable in Smalltalk.
>>
>> I disagree. Of course, once you know how to use Squeak, you don't need
>> a book. But a book woukd be crucial if the goal is to make it easy for
>> new people to learn it.
>>
>> First problem: People who want to discover Squeak won't *believe*
>> that a book is not needed. Don't even try. If the goal is to make 
>> Squeak easy
>> to learn, write a book. Kind of like an API to implement. Leran == 
>> Book. No book,
>> no learn.
>>
>> Another thing is that a book should tell you the stuff that is not 
>> trivially apparent,
>> like how to use Squeak to find more infos so you don't need that book ;-)
>>
>> It should talk about Design, Patterns, good style, good ideas (e.g. 
>> testing), stuff
>> like that. You can't tell me that this is "apparent" from just looking 
>> at Squeak
>> (especially as Squeak is mostly an example of what *not* to do!)
>>
>> And trees: That's what it is, even today. I print every paper I have 
>> to read,
>> I don't know many people who read pdfs on screen.
>>
>> I don't think that a language can be successfull without having
>> "the book" published. E.g. Ruby's success ouside japan is
>>  unthinkable without the book.
> 
> +1
> 
> However, for such a book you need a great author, particularly for the 
> Good Style part, which should not be a separate part but mention it in 
> passing. I'm a bit sceptic the community could create such a thing, I 
> rather think some individual would have to take this on. There have been 
> people on this list with a great writing style, but it's a major 
> undertaking none-the-less.
> 
> Something that would be possible for the community might be updating the 
> Orange Book for Squeak. That would be particularly helpful to newbies, 
> learning the Smalltalk way of interactive development, rather than the 
> edit-save-compile-run-crash-cycle they're usually used to. This is the 
> basic thing you cannot learn from looking at source code.
> 

I like the idea to adapt the Orange book to Squeak (or to translate it 
in french for example) but what about the copyright ?


--                                                         oooo
Dr. Serge Stinckwich                                     OOOOOOOO
Université de Caen>CNRS UMR 6072>GREYC>MAD               OOESUGOO
http://purl.org/net/SergeStinckwich                       oooooo
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]   \  /
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