Hi, Skip. It is not possible to do what you've described, but I trust those who come to J to have much more modest expectations of the material.
When in the early phase of encountering J, a reader will be working both on the most basic aspects of the language and on advanced aspects that fit their particular interests. They may be naturally drawn to look at C. or p.. or t. because of the sorts of problems they are interested in solving, yet be learning things like "parameters don't need to be put in parentheses." The thing worth aiming at, in my mind, is making it easier for novices to structure their exploration. By this I mean that we help them learn the relationship among the major concepts that apply in J. Hyperlinking provides a nice tool for this, but the hard work is in extracting the concepts, communicating them well, and organizing the component explanations well. My main point here, though, is just to say that anybody who learns J will do so by returning again and again to particular examples and explanations. Assuming this, rather than assuming that the reader needs to be able to walk away with full understanding from a single reading, may help in deciding what should be written and how it is best organized. -- T On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:48 AM, Skip Cave <[email protected]> wrote: > ... > > That is the primary difficulty with a random-access reference/tutorial. > How can you make every NuVoc page provide enough information so that it > can be the first page that a novice sees, and still provide all the > information they need to understand the specific symbol that they are > looking up? ... > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
