On Friday, 23 January 2015 at 17:19:44 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
OTOH, do I hear the cry of a volunteer? ;-) (I'm only
half-joking...
the thing is, if nobody steps up to write said tutorial, it
isn't gonna
materialize. The rest of us are already busy enough with
whatever it is
we're contributing to D.
I could try in my spare time but I don't think I qualify as a D
guru since there are some shady D areas I have yet to learn
properly myself. It has to be a collaborative effort.
On Friday, 23 January 2015 at 17:19:44 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Having said that, though, I thought Ali's D
book is pretty good in terms of serving as a beginner's
tutorial to D?
Or do we need a different one more geared towards seasoned
programmers?
(Ali's book is primarily targeted towards newbie programmers).)
Ali's book is VERY good. The best part is that you can load it on
Kindle / tablet / whatever (I did!) and take it with you.
However, it's _not_ an official "30 minutes to D" guide. It's
more like "1 month to D if you survive it" because it's very
thorough and detailed. Come on, it's a bit too boring to only get
to a for loop in chapter 10 if I'm just excited to see what the
language is all about. For instance, I'm fairly certain that
metaprogramming (at its simplest) should appear early in the
guide.
Yeah I've run into the same problem. Google search does not
eliminate
the need for a proper, well-thought-out, navigable index.
I'm thinking perhaps an autogenerated alphabetical index of all
symbols
might be in order here?
Yep, see my post above re: the incremental index. It's absolutely
doable with DDOC / client-side JS.
Easy. We pick a suitable beginner's tutorial -- either Ali's
excellent
book or something you or some other volunteer writes up, and
put a big
fat link to it in a prominent place on the front page. Problem
solved.
The problem is - I don't think we actually have one. And it
really has to live on dlang.org to feel official and up to date.
It has to be reasonably succinct but exciting, not too formal,
well-styled, with links to official docs and "read more there and
there" anchors.
If you're not happy with Ali's book, please contribute your
own. I'm
pretty sure the dlang.org maintainers will be more than glad to
include
it.
I (personally) am happy with Ali's book of course! But as I've
already said a link to the book != a proper _official_
introduction. It could largely overlap though, that's true.
Would you like to step up and spearhead this effort?
Not alone by myself, that's for sure :) Ideally, someone who's
already done a considerable amount of work on a book / docs, of
course...
Good! So let's see the PR's. :-)
This needs to be well thought through :) But if noone objects to
the style of "Rust by Example" which I tend to like -- perhaps we
could come up with something similar (and perhaps more
interesting, especially when it gets to all the metaprogramming
jazz).
