Hi Carl and ML members,
in answer to your following question, I myself offer the community my Computer
Science(CS) teacher's view about learning REBOL vs
offering/developing REBOL tutorial(s) :
So, what do you think is the #1 thing we can do to get greater
stickyness? I estimate we get more than 15,000 visitors checking
out "newbie" pages each month. How can we get more of them learning
and using REBOL?
I don't think there is a single item to fulfill but we can concentrate on one
of them and follow with other pending work/tasks as
time permits us.
First we must concentrate on the fact that visitors can fall in one of the two
following categories :
1- real newbies looking for their first programming language to support their
first CS design/coding effort,
2- real programmers having used one or many real programming languages in the
past and trying to evaluate
if REBOL can fit in for their particular situation/project(s) and how.
The first category is representative of any student that begins a CS curriculum
in a secondary chool, a college or a university. If
we want to offer some valuable study material with concrete but kept simple
examples showing how REBOL fulfills their CS needs and
in the same time show how REBOL also fulfills current technological trends
(gradually increased difficulty CS notions - from 101
level up to 301 level, easy to advanced GUI development, network/internet
programming, parsing of strings for validation and other
processing, etc...)
In this way we need some "structured set" of gradual and multi-domain examples
that add to and complete the actual material
(dictionary, , "For those new to REBOL" HTML articles, Cookbook of REBOL code
examples).
In my view the new material would look a bit like the actual Cookbook but their
contents/explored notions should be cross-indexed to
offer a better search tool when the student is confronted with the design of
its own problem and looking for related learning
material.
Another material to offer for true CS beginners should concern the illustration
of basic REBOL words as was done in 2001 by the
REBOL Word browser (the script was then named %view-ref.r) which offered to
comment individual words and coud also refer to other
existing material from the library, the cookbook or anything else).
Finally the tool could be enhanced to offer the user a new view based on
notions instead of REBOL words and finally the updating
could be put in the hands of a small committee as is actually done for the
Library.
The notions to develop can be found from any good programming starter book and
I would be pleased to type and organize the TOC
entries from a couple of books I own if this can help us to start the process.
(Tools for structured design - An intro to
programming logic - and How to solve it by Computer)
For the second category of visitors, those people that already learned a first
language before trying REBOL, the existing
information and added one could be indexed differently based on programming
task to accomplish. Here again the actual Cookbook of
examples can be used as a starting basis.
The notions to be covered could be taken and adapted for REBOL from the book "A
VB6 programmer's Toolkit" - A pragmatic approach to
identifying, addressing, and solving common programming problems. This book is
written by Hank Marquis and Eric Smith and is edited
at Apress. The cover also adds on its cover : Covers the techniques that
beginning books miss - Numerous real code examples to
illustrate each solution.
Looks much like the spirit of the actual cookbook but a bit more structured and
better indexed. to help you have a quick view here
is a Quick Contents of the TOC:
Chapter Contents
Page
1 Arrays and Array manipulation
1
2 Strings and String Handling
23
3 Fun with numbers, numeric processing and logic 41
4 Working with dates and times 59
5 Data Structures: Versatile vahicles for data storage 69
6 Windows Files, Directories and drives 89
7 Persistence: Remembering what you can't afford to 115
forget
8 Localization: The art of talking like a Native 127
9 Working with networks
141
10 Reliable and flexible Data Validation 161
11 Working with the Operating System 183
12 Windows Help System - From the Inside 195
13 Multiple Documents Inteface Forms 207
14 Database Programming 229
15 Active Data Objects
249
16 Objects, objects and more objects 269
17 WebClasses: A new way to program for the Web 289
Chapters 12, 13, 15, and 17 should be replaced with something nearer to REBOL
Chapter 16 could be introduced sooner even before chapter 5 since they are
more natural to introduce with REBOL.
In summary what the Cookbook does is help visitors from a problem/task view but
nothing relates the work done to a standard CS
curriculum - except for people having previous programming experience. And this
missing part is important to true CS beginners.
My 2 cents,
Gerard
P.S. For feedback if any, please send it but you'll have to wait 2 weeks befor
I can comment since I leave home for vacation today
in the morning and I plan to come back around July the 27th.
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