Adrian Williams wrote:
Beginners and old hands would benefit if code they seek is more clearly emphasised. All words are important, but in programming, surely, it is the code itself that should take pride of place. Some books use a grey background patch for passages of code. This is not ideal either. Code in paragraph text needs to be emphasised in exactly the same manner as large passages to avoid confusion. Just a more contrasting set of fonts is really all thats needed. Like Times Roman and Verdana Bold for maximum contrast! If it must be a monospaced font, then I don't see anything on the market that fits the bill at the moment. I would gladly create and supply (gratis) a Courier-like font of 'Black' weight to anyone undertaking such a venture, so long as it's a Revolution trainer.
Lucida Console or Bitstream Vera Sans (monospace) would be good starting points. And Demi rather than Black would be a good choice, I think. But I could live with the typographic limitations of "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought" if I had volumes II and III....
I still use the "MetaCard Users Guide", stuffed with print-outs of juicy, illuminating extracts from [EMAIL PROTECTED] from around 1998, to clarify my thinking on occasion. I think I would also rely on Danny Goodman's HyperCard works as well, if only I had them. Still, to my mind, the xTalk paradigm of programming has never been well-enough presented to entice beginners into the fold, or experts to distill and extend their expertise. Only Squeak is less-usefully documented, and more deserving of the effort.
A newcomer to Revolution should be able to learn all he or she needs to know to program a particular task, and not get involved with anything outside the dependency-chain of skills and techniques needed for that task, by threading a relevant path through the documentation. The lack of economic incentive to produce such a task-oriented documentation suite is puzzling, given the cost of the product and its placement in the upper echelons of programming power. The ultimate cost of NOT having the proper learning tools has to be staggeringly higher than the cost of developing them.
---- Jerry Muelver _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
