Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

One good book, please.

Author:Matt Jadud
Posted:4/3/1999; 1:03:48 PM
Topic:One good book, please.
Msg #:4776
Prev/Next:4775 / 4777

Are there plans for another book akin to Matt's Frontier 4 book? The current documentation model has a number of problems with it from my viewpoint, and it would be wonderful to see a new, up-to-date text hit the shelves for what is an otherwise excellent product.

Problems with the current documentation model:

1) Online I don't live on-line. It is tedious to download and store every doc page I find of use on the local hard-drive. Links break, images disappear, and any of a host of other problems develop.

2) Screen size I'm trapped on an aging 15" monitor. That won't change. At 800x600 resolution, it is a pain to flip around windows to try and find the docs and then back to code - I want it all in front of me, and a book is a lot easier to manage than a new monitor.

3) History Every author makes assumptions. I have not been living Frontier for the past X years - I have started using this tool just over a month ago. Every tutorial on the web makes a different set of assumptions as to what you do and do not know about Frontier. Rarely are there pointers saying "You should have read sites X,Y, and Z before this one."

4) Continuity and Scope Similar to history, continuity is very difficult to maintain in a scattered sea of tutorials. Each author would like to bring their own bit of wit to the scene, yet I as a reader trying to either see the larger picture or find a minute detail could care less about some nifty bell or whistle that particular author found or thinks is nice to know about.

5) User Interface Books are not yet dead. While search engines are wonderful, I unfortunately often have to resort to AltaVista or Google as my means for obtaining simple questions. Search engines are, in my opinion, fairly evil, since to find something, you need to know what you are looking for! Frontier is a consolidated tool and language, and I'm unfamiliar with both. I can pick up volumes of information on C, Perl, Java, Pagemaker, Photoshop - but for Frontier in its upcoming incarnation, I can't get my hands on something serial, something I can carry with me, something I can thumb through and mark up with my own notes - a book.

I love the product - I'm purchasing Frontier 6. Kudos and a half to the individuals out there documenting and working to make this software usable. I've been very impressed with the community in that I dropped a note to two random individuals at various points with questions re: their scripts or code, and they were very responsive - I hope I can return that favor.

But good docs are good docs. Will I get them with 6? Are there plans for another good text? Am I stark raving mad in this digital age, or are any of my points valid?

Thank you for your time. My apologies if I ranted - its just that I learned Java and Perl to a degree that I can process text and dynamically serve pages in less time than it has taken me to get through the basics of Frontier site development.

Later, Matt

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