Re: [Fwd: Re: [DotGNU]The C# Book - The plan]

[Peter Minten]

Gopal V wrote:

> > > pedantic tutorials rehashing the same tired old ground.
>
> The real question is "Do we have enough time and people to write a pedantic
> reference manual ?"

No, besides I for one don't even want to write such a boring book.

> > > 'C# Gems' would be better than 'C# for dummies'.
>
> What I'm attempting is not a 'C# Gems' package, but a solid level ground
> of examples and documents which explain what Pnet does and how you can do
> it ...
>
> Sure we'll have a couple of *tough* exercise sets and a set of clever
> code snippets .. It is upto the adventurous programmer to splice them
> together.

I'm all in favor of that.

> > The book is aimed at beginners in programming, not programmers learning
> > a new language.
>
> Well I really think we lack the resources to teach beginners OO languages.
> IMO they're better off learning procedure oriented programming first .....
> Learning C (the merciless) is an experience which either makes you a great
> programmer or makes you use VB (fate worse than death).....

Actually VB on itself isn't too bad, with a good FS implementation like Gambas
it's a good language for starters. The problem with VB is the MS 
implementation that makes every decent programmer cry out for COBOL after 
half an hour of hacking with it :-).

You're probably right that we can't write a beginners book, so I now concur 
that we should stick to writing for C programmers.

> The recipe idea helps the dummys as well as the experts ... we're not
> here to uplift the IQ of the world by 10 ... Hackers will always explore
> stuff till they hit the end

All right, recipes it is.

> Too tough ... it is really tough to write good docs about basic stuff ...
> My advice would be to build on the GNU C Tutorial and start where it
> left off and add a bit of OO explanation there and .... we have a nice
> document .
>
> see <<book-tree>> for a rough idea of what I have in mind.
 
Eh, problem: there is no mention of basics of the language like if..then and
for(;;). Though you may say that C programmers know that stuff already there 
are some nasty differences in the details on some points (no fall-trough for
example). I've modified the file to include some extra points, my version is
attached to this message.
 
> I could dump it into dotgnu-libs CVS in dotgnu-doc ??? (is any1
> even remotely interested).
 
Good idea.