> > > I tend to agree with this, think that a collaborative approach is unlikely > to produce a consistent and high quality tutorial. I don't want to > discourage anybody but my current opinion is that we should hire an > experienced technical writer to do this piece especially, with input from > the wider community. Where I think collaboration is more likely to produce > something nice is in a 'cookbook' style document, of which several people > have already worked on seperately. Also of course API docs and the > reference manual are places where individuals can plug in their own > sections without impacting the overall narrative flow. > > So I spent this evening going through the tutorial (.08). As an outsider to Rust, I can tell you it does not fit any model of a tutorial, but instead is an elongated language reference broken down into feature sections. Which is highly useful in its design, and does say "This tutorial assumes that the reader is already familiar with one or more languages in the C family. Understanding of pointers and general memory management techniques will help." BUT...
It was not until section 17, that I finally met with a simple program that could compile. That was 2 1/2 hours later before I was able to DO SOMETHING. I would encourage the Mozilla team to hire a technical writer as Brian suggests, that would turn the tutorial upside down... Start with something fun and entertaining in under 10 or 20 lines of Rust, that would amuse and provide "hackability" to tweak and play with values, mutability, and seeing the stack pop itself (half the developers in the world, do not know or have to worry about "a stack"..but of course "should" in any decent systems language :-) ), and then introduce garbage collecting, etc. Introduce compile-able examples from the start, and continue with working examples that actually produce errors and let the user come to grips with the syntax & compiler error output, while coaching them through fixing the errors, and learning the do's and don'ts of Rust's current best practices. That would be a mighty fine tutorial and the makings of a book for Rust itself. 2 cents and a haircut and I wish the team tremendous success on finding a talented writer, -- -Thad +ThadGuidry <https://www.google.com/+ThadGuidry> Thad on LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/>
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