On 1/5/2010 14:11, Bill Harris wrote: > I'm starting a J Study Group this Friday morning in my department of > analysts, and I'm looking for tips on ways to make programming in J both > interesting and understandable rapidly. We've agreed to dedicate 30 > minutes once a week to "guided exploration"; I hope that at least some of > the group will decide to learn more on their own because they find J > worthwhile in their work. > > In the past, I've advised people to start with the Primer. Now there are > also useful labs, and there's Learning J (there's the great JfC, too, but > I think that's a bit much for this group at the start). I'm curious if > any of you have any suggestions on what has worked well to get people into > J quickly in ways that make it stick. > > I'm thinking I'll say a couple of words and then point them to a lab or > the Primer or LJ and set them loose, answering questions that may come up > and asking them questions to encourage their experimentation. > > Do any of you have suggestions? Do you have experience teaching this > stuff somewhere that might be useful to me in planning what we do? Are > there NYCJUG experiences worth considering? Feel free to be as explicit > as "Start with the Primer through Checkpoint A (or whatever) and then do > the "A Taste of J 1 and 2" labs, followed by ...." I'm hoping to stay > with the Primer, LJ, or labs instead of creating something on my own. I > know there are many other good sources of information on various people's > Web sites, too. > > I conjecture that one of the hangups for newcomers is getting data into > and out of J. It's easy to teach the avg fork, but people don't want to > type in the data they need to have to make use of various verbs -- they > want to read a spreadsheet or database (or text file or HTML table > perhaps). > > To that end, I'm considering doing two things, and I'm curious in your > feedback. For one, I'm thinking of deploying JOD on a shared drive, so > that we can put J words there that all might find useful. (I presume that > works; I've never used it because I used Linux in my own business.) > > Second, I'm thinking of including a few typical verbs to read a > spreadsheet using tara or taraxml and grab the data. Yes, one can use > tara directly, but it might make life easier for newcomers to have a verb > that will read a worksheet, extract a rectangular numeric section between > two cells, and convert that to an array (or to extract a partial row or > column of string data and put it into a different J array). > > Any thoughts on that? I want to keep it simple, but JOD seemed like a > useful way to go. > > Thanks, > > Bill >
Bill, Here is one example of what I find useful with J: http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Scripts/WeatherPlot -- David Mitchell ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
