Perhaps this is an indication that we need to revisit the layout of the
manuals to make them easier to use and put this as a high priority for
things to address going forward. If the documentation is difficult to
navigate, this can be a turnoff to users.
Regards
lance
John Embretsen wrote:
I know navigating the Derby manuals and finding what you are looking
for can be
a gruesome experience for both users and developers.
Various tricks can be used to make this easier, e.g. searching all
manuals
combined into one PDF (such as those found here:
http://dbtg.thresher.com/derby/test/DerbyDocs/index.html ), or using
advanced
Google searches.
Inspired by David's blog post (and comments) at
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/davidvc/archive/2007/06/searching_the_d.html
I created my own custom (google) search engine for searching the Derby
docs and
public API. It's available for everyone to use, the URL is
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=013165901514945153857%3A6lvlcohwpjo
(unfortunately not so easy to remember).
I've made some refinements for searching a particular Derby version, or a
particular manual in the doc trunk. There is currently a max limit of 16
refinements.
It's possible to volunteer to contribute to this search engine for
those who
feel inspired, but maybe it would be better to somehow create
something similar
that is "owned" by apache, and include it on our web page?
Anyway, I hope this is useful to someone.
