Great, looks like a very ambitious effort. It seems pretty much like Hubbes old "tutorial" in scope, which except for some initial examples and excercises is a fairly terse reference (and incomplete by now). Have you looked at it? Maybe parts of it can be reused.
I take it it should foremost be a "no-nonsense" reference for the core language. If so, I think every concept should be as localized as possible, and the chapter "Advanced Functionality" isn't very apt. For instance, the garbage collector should be presented close to the data types, and threads could just as well be presented in the core functionality chapter. The distinction of what about programs, functions and objects that are described under "Object Datatypes" and "Object Orientation" is a bit hazy; maybe they should be combined.
Btw, what's "Pipelining and Advanced Variable Access" about?
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS
Previous text:
2003-12-21 17:40: Subject: More conference items: book and mailing list
Hi All,
[apologies in advance for the cross-posting, i wasn't sure of the coverage on both lists]
I've been going through some of the items from the conference, and I thought I'd take a little initiative. To that end, here's an update:
- A pike book
I've decided to start work on Pike book. My target is somewhere between the tutorial and the source code or modref. That is, a relatively complete reference to the most important parts of the language such as constructs and important features, but not a function reference (important functions such as Stdio and the like will be covered). My plan is to assume basic programming knowledge that isn't necessarily assumed in the current tutorial online. I've gotten a good bit of feedback regarding what's missing, from programming savvy individuals that have tried to pick up pike.
I've placed a first crack at a table of contents here:
http://hww3.riverweb.com/dist/PikeManual.txt
Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated (additions, deletions, reorganizations, etc)
Also, unrelated to this effort, I was wondering who owned the copyright on the current tutorial... does anyone know? I was thinking of getting a few copies of this material printed and bound, but don't want to end up with a lawyer at my door. If there's interest from anyone out there, please let me know.
- The pike@roxen.com mailing list archive
As part of my research into topic #1 above, I got thinking that there's a large amount of good information locked away in the mailing list archives. Unfortunately, the only way to get at it right now is to use the mailing list archive server, which is relatively inconvenient. In order to remedy this situation, I've put a very simple, searchable archive online here:
http://modules.gotpike.org:8000/list/
It's not fulltext search (my mysql is apparently not happy about doing fulltext), but it does use substring searching, so it's at least as good as a simple grep. It will probably move to a more suitable location in the future. Thanks to Martin Bahr for the archive mailbox, going back 7 years.
As always, comments and feedback are welcome...
Bill
/ Brevbäraren