I have to say, I think the Revolution documentation is pretty good. Obviously there are many things available in Rev that one forgets if one is not using Rev almost every day. However, whenever I return to using Rev after some weeks away from it, I find that I never spend more than a couple of minutes searching through the dictionary to find what I want. The Dictionary is an extraordinary device for me - it offers complete information, but does so without making me wade through lots of stuff I don't want. People have produced versions of the Dictionary that perform faster or take up less screen space, and they have been welcome additions (although these days I mostly just stick with the ordinary Dictionary).
I came from a non-Hypercard background, and when I first started to learn Rev there was only the documentation stacks that come with Rev (there is more now - the User Guide, and the videos). I felt I was really missing something so I bought some hypercard books and they helped a lot. I bought the two volumes of the Danny Goodman book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-HyperCard-2-2-Handbook/dp/0679791221/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251725810&sr=8-3), for about the price it is being sold for on Amazon. I also bought Jeanne Devoto's book on Hyperscript. I don't have the Goodman book any more (I gave it to a friend who I introduced to Rev). And I think that it was the Hyperscript book that was more helpful, but that book doesn't even seem to be available on amazon at all. The Goodman book provided a general overview of the Hypercard/Message path, but once I'd got on top of that, then I found myself referring to the Hyperscript book more. Of course, since those books are quite old and for a very similar but also slightly different tool to Rev, there are some places where they would be misleading to new user to Rev. Does the PDF of the User Guide that comes with Rev not help? I would think that that would serve as a good general introduction/orientation to new users or infrequent users. There are times when I might have been away from Rev for some months, and I would find myself turning to the User Guide in order to remind myself of something (usually to do with custom properties/custom property sets!) The 'cookbook' existed with the Rev documentation from about version 1.1.1 to about 2.7. It wasn't really a list of the many alternative ways to do things, so much as single examples answering questions of the 'how would I do...' variety. I'm not sure it would really benefit new users to have a cookbook that showed several of the many different ways to do things. But maybe the old cookbook ought to be revived. If only because the idea of such easy recipes' shows what can be achieved in Rev. One of the friends I introduced to Rev stopped using after a few months, because she couldn't see how to make any use of it. She ended up choosing Filemaker instead - it seemed that the fact that Filemaker was a more limited/more specific framework for development suited her better. Bernard On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Adrian Williams<[email protected]> wrote: > Not coming from a HyperCard background does not prepare one for Rev's > principles. > If there are different ways to achieve the same thing, then let's have some > cross-referenced examples. > I've seen talk of a 'cookbook' on this list. Perhaps it is time for someone > to captalise on that? > > Like the Internet, when something is too flexible, it's a job to know where > to start. > Three ways to accomplish a few commonly used tasks may be enough to > introduce novices the various processes. > Three ways to "Launch an application" > Three ways to "Track the path to a file" > Three ways to... > _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
