From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <472B7691.4010807@kix.in> Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 00:42:17 +0530 From: Anant Narayanan User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Macintosh/20070728) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Suggestion: Programming Tutorial for /sys/doc References: <02597431-3833-4DDD-8720-E0B2761DBE88@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <02597431-3833-4DDD-8720-E0B2761DBE88@mac.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: e713f0b6-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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