Re: [Fwd: Re: [DotGNU]The C# Book - The plan]

[Gopal V]

If memory serves me right, Peter Minten wrote:
> more off-road approach is important to the book.

Thanks peter for dragging this point in ...

> They surely aren't off track, in fact this kind of positive criticism is just
> what we need.

Any criticism is good criticism ... it is up to me to accept it or not :-)
(but you seem to have a lot of points I have been thinking over ... see 
earlier post)
> All C# books available today covers C# used for .NET, .NET has a lot 
> of classes in it that aren't in the ECMA standard and thus aren't in 
> DotGNU, and DotGNU has classes that aren't in .NET. 
> learning how to program in DotGNU would be a lot harder 

This is the reason why we are writing this book .. to make it easier
to work on DotGNU.
> > It would be nice to see a book that gives only cursory attention to the
> > basics and instead focuses on what C# can or cannot do that differentiates
> > it from other languages.  The question isn't how to use C# but why to use
> > C#.  

That is my idea of the Learning DotGNU book .... something that helps
a C programmer migrate ...

> > Something more like a cook-book of useful receipes and patterns as
> > accomplished in C#. 

Well the idea is to let the developer transfer his ideas into C# .

> > pedantic tutorials rehashing the same tired old ground.  

The real question is "Do we have enough time and people to write a pedantic
reference manual ?"

> > 'C# Gems' would be better than 'C# for dummies'.  

What I'm attempting is not a 'C# Gems' package, but a solid level ground
of examples and documents which explain what Pnet does and how you can do
it ... 

Sure we'll have a couple of *tough* exercise sets and a set of clever 
code snippets .. It is upto the adventurous programmer to splice them
together.

> The book is aimed at beginners in programming, not programmers learning 
> a new language.

Well I really think we lack the resources to teach beginners OO languages.
IMO they're better off learning procedure oriented programming first .....
Learning C (the merciless) is an experience which either makes you a great
programmer or makes you use VB (fate worse than death).....

> This is because of the fact that recipes give a programmer a prefab 
> way of doing things, using recipes creates programmers who work by the
> book and thus are badly fit for real life programming.

I'm a great fan of recipes ... some of the useless-python scripts have
inspired me to do things I never even thought about ... (an example
would be delegate like python objects... __call__) .

"Good programmers write code , great programmers reuse"

The recipe idea helps the dummys as well as the experts ... we're not
here to uplift the IQ of the world by 10 ... Hackers will always explore
stuff till they hit the end 

> road of schoolbook style tutorials is a very good idea (and if we encourage
> students to learn by working on Free Software projects a very beneficial
> one too :-). 

Too tough ... it is really tough to write good docs about basic stuff ...
My advice would be to build on the GNU C Tutorial and start where it
left off and add a bit of OO explanation there and .... we have a nice
document .

see <<book-tree>> for a rough idea of what I have in mind.

I could dump it into dotgnu-libs CVS in dotgnu-doc ??? (is any1 
even remotely interested).

Gopal

PS: I'm down with a fever and prolly will be for two more days while it 
    passes... will be back to work feverishly (sic) on the book later.
-- 
The difference between insanity and genius is measured by success

book-tree
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