For the next week or so, I'll be migrating the existing wiki into a MediaWiki installation at watir.net During that time, I ask that editing be reined in until the new wiki is ready.
Editing at the new site during this volatile time is welcome, but don't be offended if it gets shuffled around. =) ---- ---- I've been doing my Watir scriptly mostly through dumb luck and the jurry-rigging of example code. How many others are following this same pattern? I tend to get an idea in my head.. play around with it based on the limited set of commands that I know, get frustrated and go looking for examples, bend other peoples code to my use, break things horribly.. try (and fail) to understand the various error messages, often getting frustrated at having to test and re-test. Some of the things that I'm doing to help myself: * Keep good notes and examples handy, so I can remember commands. * Keep all sorts of notes and code resources handy, so that I know where to turn when I want to steal some good code. * Try to pay attention to "good coding practices", even though many don't make sense right now. Write things dwn. * Try to remember what error messages are trying to convey, to make debugging time less stressful. * Learn to use irb, which I very strongly despise. It feels embarassingly amateurish to me. * Find and use an editor which can tell me what line number things break on, and hopefully why. * Get more comfortable with help resources.. technical docs and such. Write examples whenever I can, since technical docs are utterly worthless for communicating to regular folk.. they have no examples and are vague at best. I've been trying and trying to get more Ruby and Watir experience, and to that end I've been more directly tackling the above ideas. One of the ways I'll be doing that, and hopefully helping out a lot of other struggling watir-ists is through the new Watir wiki: http://watir.net My goals for the watir wiki: In a week or two: * Absorb the existing wiki's content. * Absorb the original wiki's content. Next: * A revised tutorial -- I wrote bunches of notes while learning Watir, and those will find a home in an easily-digested tutorial. * A user-contributed snippets database. * A user-contributed resource page. Absorb my own notes from http://jrandomhacker.info/Watir etc. Longer-term goals: * Absorb and annotate the Watir test cases. Everyone keeps referring to these as the examples to do all the various Watir functions. That's great, except the only feedback I've heard on them is that they're completely inaccessible to new people because they're not carved up into well-commented bites. * Coding style -- absorbed into the easily-digested tutorials will be coding style notes that describe why one choice was made over another. For example, why "rescue" is and isn't a good idea in various circumstances. (I still don't fully understand this one) http://watir.net _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
