Hello, I think SAGE might potentially greatly benefit from certain types of new documentation. Unfortunately, after consider a number of possibilities, I'm unsure about how to proceed. I'll discuss the best idea Josh Kantor and I came up with below. Let me know what you think, or suggest something else if you have any other ideas, or let me know what your concerns are (or if you would like to volunteer some writing).
We could create a new manual, similar in format to the "SAGE Tutorial", "SAGE Reference manual", etc., but instead entitled "SAGE Overview". This latex document might have chapters entitled as follows, and primary contributors as listed to the right: * Calculus -- me, Bobby Moretti, ?? * Combinatorics -- Robert Miller, Emily Kirkman * Algebra -- Martin Albrecht, David Joyner * Number Theory -- William Stein, Jaap Spies, David Kohel * Linear Algebra -- Josh Kantor, Robert Bradshaw, William Stein * Numerical Computation -- Josh Kantor * Plotting -- Tom Boothby, Josh Kantor, Me, Alex Clemesha Each chapter would have a few paragraphs that overview what one can do in SAGE related to each topic, followed by sections that go into more detail with examples. This is probably a very rough prototype of the sort of information the numerical computation chapter might provide: http://www.math.washington.edu/~jkantor/C_Fortran/C_Fortran.html The idea is that if you're a new users to SAGE, after getting some very basic feeling for SAGE, you flip directly to the relevant chapter of the book *for you*, e.g., if you do algebra you read that chapter, if you do calculus you read the calculus chapter, etc. And in reading that chapter, you get a pretty good sense of what SAGE is capable in your specialty, where to find further documentation (e.g., when you read about number theory, you learn that SAGE includes NTL, that NTL can do blah, and that you can find out more at location xyz). Also, there are some (but not too many) doctested examples throughout. What do people think? People would contribute to this document using hg_doc patches, just like they do now with tutorial, etc., contributions. An alternative would be to create short books for each topical area. This might be more manageable, or it might be less manageable; I'm not sure. -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://www.williamstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
