Re: [9fans] Suggestion: Programming Tutorial for /sys/doc

[Anant Narayanan <anant@kix.in>]

Pietro Gagliardi wrote:
> cover in a clear way, so I think a tutorial should be put in. I already
> started writing one, and I think it would benefit from being in
>     - graphics and controls

While I am mostly able understand the other concepts you mention from
existing documentation, I find graphics (libdraw) to be somewhat
cryptic. I've always felt the need for a tutorial-style introduction on
how to do graphics in Plan 9.

The current solution seems to be mostly be: "Read the code". Which isn't
really as good.

Uriel wrote:
> Just thinking out loud here so I might make no sense, but I suspect
> the issue is that the style of the plan9 documentation is very
> different from what people have become used to expect, this days
> people expects 'tutorials' and other handholding with many examples to
> 'copy paste' into their code and so on, which is quite different from
> the Unix/Plan 9 documentation style of clear and concise information
> and simple examples that help illustrate the general concepts, but
> that does require the reader to actually *understand* things rather
> than just follow an arbitrary set of steps.

Sometimes people need hand-holding, especially when they're trying to
learn a completely new system. I am all for conventional tutorial-style
introductions to Plan 9.

Even if the tutorial shamelessly repeats a lot (all?) of the information
in the man pages and papers, redundancy in documentation never really
hurt anyone. In fact, the more, the merrier :)

Cheers,
--
Anant