Hi Daniel,
> What is the best documentation resource to learn wxPerl? Everything I > can find is hugely out of date, and often poorly written: Documentation in any project is always difficult, it's worse when you have a volunteer project and sadly harder still when there are few people in the project the problem is often, 'where do I spend my time, coding or writing documentation'. I too found the going painful and difficult with Wx perl, for the most part all the intros are just that. There doesn't appear to be a cook book of sorts out there, and you often end up stuck between knowing what you want to do, but not knowing HOW you do it. When I started on PerlTk there was a book out there that filled in a huge number of gaps, which made the task of learning a little easier and you felt more productive in a shorter time frame. However, without such a resource though this is where experience counts. I consoled myself in the end by taking a more pragmatic approach to Wx codding, yes, it can be hard to get to where you want to be, but by taking your time you learn things and while you might not retain everything, you quickly get the hang of layouts such that you start with a frame, then a sizer, typically horizontal and then inside of that layout your widgets. > > Can anyone suggest where I can learn wxPerl? Hard work to start with... :) One option is to try out some of the GUI GUI builders out there, such as wxGlade, which will generate perl code for you ( not the best, but it's a start ). There's also the wxFormBuilder applciation that creates an XML file fort the GUI. Recently Adam Kennedy has been working on a tool to take that and make it "Padre friendly" such that rather than build GUI elements by manual coding, we do it in formbuilder and then have the module translate that to something more in line with 'correct' perl. I haven't used it much myself though so I could have some of that info incorrect. The best source of information for me though was the wxperl_demo.pl script. This has in the past shown me how to use a number of different widgets when I get stuck. The intro articles do help with getting started, enough so that you can leap ahead from. >From there, I found the python docs to be useful in understanding the parameters for the various methods etc, but to be honest, found the syntax hard to decipher. However I will mention now that the C++ docs themselves are readable once you get the feel for how Wx Perl works, and in that, Padre recently saw the addition of the Wx Widgets documentation added to it's contextual help system. Now when ever I code and need a reference, it's just a matter of F2 and type in Wx:: and the class I'm after to get help. This is available in version 0.68 and was contributed by Ahmed Zawawi over Padre's birthday hackathon. If you find yourself looking for an editor, Padre, with some of its rough edges is a reasonable choice, even more so now with the Wx Documentation available to the help system. In the end, I figured that Wx is worthy of the learning curve, Mattia continues to support the community doing the crazy hard stuff, and projects like Padre ( and I think Kephra too ) prove that "big applciations" can be written in Perl and Wx. Peter.
