[Espressomd-maintainer] Fwd: Tutorial

[Olaf Lenz]

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Die folgende Kritik an den Tutorials kam von Joost.


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Subject:        Tutorial
Date:   Tue, 16 Oct 2012 19:01:15 +0200
From:   Joost de Graaf <address@hidden>
To:     Olaf Lenz <address@hidden>



Dear Olaf,

I had a problem with the tutorials from the espresso website
*http://espressomd.org/wordpress/documentation/*, they are also in the
*doc/tutorial* folder in the espresso source. Neither one works.

Tutorial 1 (LJ) has plenty of typos, the very unfortunate while loop
thing, and I could not find lj_tutorial.tcl anywhere (I could type that
one from the manuscript) or (which is far worse, since that one is not
in the document) lj_functions.tcl, not even in previous versions of
Espresso. As is, the tutorial is confusing and cannot be done.

Tutorial 2 (charged systems) looks to be more user friendly, but here
too I ran into problems. The commands are deprecated and once you get to
the simulation part the systems explodes; my guess is that this is due
to the fact that the simulation does not use force capping in any way.

Getting back to the point, both are completely unsuitable as 'Let's try
to write my first script from scratch' tutorials. Perhaps you should
remove them from the website. As some parts are still somewhat useful,
you might want to keep them, but there should at the very least be be a
warning about their status and inexecutability; for people who are as
'naive' as myself \;-) If someone from outside starts playing with
espresso using these tutorials, their initial impression will not be
positive.

Kind Regards,

Joost

PS. I'm working my way through some of the other tutorials in the
espresso source too, just to get some basic familiarity with the inner
workings of espresso. I'll let you know how they worked out.

PPS. Perhaps a little late, but a small comment on the espresso summer
school. The reason why I am trying the tutorials is because I did not
feel that I would be able to write my own script from scratch on
Espresso after the tutorial - which is basically true for any summer
school on programming. So I wanted to see if I could get some insight
into how to structure scripts and write some basic simulations from the
tutorials. I guess you seemed to want to address this 'problem' with the
espresso summer school in a possible "sit down with an espresso
programmer and work on a problem you are interested in" session. But it
might be useful to also rework the some of the tutorials (at least the
online ones) to make them work for espresso 3.1.1 so that people can
also play around 'in a safe environment' when they go home and get more
confidence with the platform.





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