Ian, I have not completed reading JinaDay, but have a few observations.
You throw a lot of detail at the reader early on especially in the code snippets without explaining much of that detail. That seems to me to be off putting, but one way to reduce that would be to group that material together under a heading or an explanation/warning that the main early goal is to orient the reader to the user interface, not to learning itself. You discuss "locale" once earlier than you give a link for locale. A good link to add (unless you already have and I missed it) early on would be the following. http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/System/Installation I had trouble orienting myself to the calc.ijs calculator because it has no enter or ok button, only the "+" button. But it is a good simple app. I also was a little disoriented when I pressed numeric keys which sometime produced digits in the number field and sometimes not, as I recall, depending on where the focus of the cursor lies. Some prose describing the app's behavior might be added. When first I was reading the draft I had my browser zoomed in and the long code lines required 2 lines making the postfixed NB. statements land on a second line. This will not be a problem in Vector print or in pdf, but it was disorienting. I think this is a valuable work and you should get good feedback from this group. I am especially impressed with your knowledge of what is different in J and Apl. It might be good to corral all those differences into an appendix. If there is a standard ubiquitous Apl "recipe book of sample input statements " or app, another approach would be to state that early on and then show how it is accomplished in J. But that does not seem to be your direction, so feel free to ignore this. On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 3:19 PM, Ian Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > First draft of an article for eventual submission to VECTOR entitled > "J In A Day". > > http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/JinaDay ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
