Newbie Introduction (was Re: arrays and foreach)

[Paul D. Anderson]

SomeDude: Your outline and especially your emphasis on what a 
rank beginner needs to know is very good.

Would you consider writing it up yourself? Not the whole thing, 
maybe but the beginner info and the compiler/linker appendices. 
You have a commendable prose style.

There are tutorials available already, but too many is way better 
than too few.

Paul


On Wednesday, 18 April 2012 at 08:26:14 UTC, Somedude wrote:
> Le 17/04/2012 16:07, Ali Çehreli a écrit :
>> On 04/17/2012 12:42 AM, Somedude wrote:
>> 
>>> Sorry for hijacking this thread, but since you're around, I 
>>> hope you'll
>>> see this message. As a D beginner, I'm browsing through your 
>>> book.
>>> I wanted to tell you that there is something essential 
>>> missing in it:
>>> how to compile. It's actually quite hard to find it in the 
>>> official
>>> website, and since the first chapters are targetted at 
>>> complete
>>> beginners, I thought it would be nice to add a few lines or 
>>> pages about
>>> compilation, linking, debugging, etc.
>>> What do you think ?
>> 
>> Thank you very much for the feedback. I will do something 
>> about that.
>> 
>> Although there is no hello world compilation, the dmd command 
>> line
>> appears multiple times throughout the chapters.
>> 
>> The 'assert and enforce' chapter shows it for the -release 
>> compiler
>> switch and coincidentally I am on the 'Unit Testing' chapter 
>> as we
>> speak, which includes the -unittest switch. :)
>> 
>> But you are right, both dmd and rdmd command lines must appear 
>> earlier.
>> 
>> Thank you,
>> Ali
>> 
> Yes, I think that you have a lot of valuable information, but 
> the
> organization is lacking. The advanced chapters look good, but 
> the first
> "beginner" chapters can be .
>
> what struck me as an error in your "Hello world program" 
> chapter, you
> give as an exercise:
>
> "Type or copy the hello world program into your editor as a 
> source file,
> compile it, and run the program. The program should produce the
> following output: Hello world!
>
> If you are new to using a compiler, you will need to get help 
> from the
> compiler documentation or, preferably, an experienced person. 
> You can't
> benefit from the rest of this book if you can't compile and run 
> programs."
>
> Spock would have said: "Illogical, captain!" At this point, you 
> haven't
> told how to compile and run the program. Seriously, if your 
> book is
> aimed at complete beginners (and the first chapters seem to say 
> that),
> you really want to tell them what to do, not "go find the 
> compiler
> documentation", else if they can do that, they simply don't 
> need to read
> your book.
>
> For a complete beginner, it's very frustrating to have to read 4
> chapters of fluff, then write the program, and still not 
> knowing how to
> run the program. Where is the fun ? I can guarantee that at 
> this point,
> 9 out of 10 beginners will drop the reading.
>
>
> FIRST show, THEN explain. Better yet: first show, then ask 
> questions,
> and finally explain.
>
> So how would I have organized this chapter ?
> Something like this:
>
> ---------------
> The first program to show in most programming...
> Here is a hello world in D:
> ...
>
> Copy this program and save it in a file under the name hello.d
> .d is the extension for D source code.
>
> Now we'll compile it, that is to say the compiler will check 
> that the
> syntax of this source code, and if it is valid D, will 
> translate it into
> machine language and make it a program.
> Type in the command prompt:
> rdmd hello.d
>
> If you didn't make any mistake, you should have the impression 
> that
> nothing happened. In the contrary, everything went well ! You 
> can check
> that the executable file hello (or hello.exe under window) has 
> been
> created. If instead the compiler barked at you lots of text, you
> probably made a mistake while copying. Correct it and retry. 
> You will
> routinely make many mistakes when programming so that this 
> process of
> correcting and compiling will get very familiar.
>
> Once this is done, type the name of the executable to run it.
> You should see
> Hello, world !
>
> Congratulations, your first D program is running !
>
> ------------
>
> Then ONLY after that, I would proceed to the explanations.
> (As an exercise, I would ask also: what is the smallest valid D 
> program ?)
>
> I would put the "Hello, world" chapter at the very beginning, 
> right
> after "The practice of programming".
> This chapter would be enriched by an example on the computer, 
> showing
> the values.
>
> The order of the beginning chapters I think should be:
> Intro
> Practice of programming
> Hello world
> writeln and write
> Compiler
> Fundamental types
> I would then merge "Assignment and order of evaluation" with 
> "Variables"
>
> I would also remove the "Standard Input and Output Streams", 
> they don't
> belong to an introduction.
> In fact, the problem is, you really want to separate your 
> chapters into
> a sections, one as an introductory course, and one for more 
> advanced
> explanations of the core language, and maybe one to introduce 
> specific
> concepts of the standard library (your last chapters).
>
> I would put in Introduction section the first 19 chapters until
> "Redirecting input and output", as well as all the flow 
> constructs
> (do-while, for, foreach, switch case, you really want to merge 
> those
> with other chapters like while, these don't need separate 
> chapters),
> ternary ops and associative arrays. With that, beginning 
> programmers can
> have some fun.
>
> In the second section (core language), I would put
> File
> Program environment
> auto typeof
> name space
> litterals
> enum
> function
> function params
> Lazy ops
> Immutability
> Classes <-- I didn't see a chapter on this topic ?
> Intefaces
> Exceptions
> Scope
> Assert and Enforce
>
> In the third section (Generic Programming and advanced 
> concepts), I
> would put:
> Templates
> Mixins
> Ranges
> Parallelism
> Concurrency
> synchronized
> __traits
> calloc etc, or 2 chapters for interoperations with C/asm
>
> Etc
>
> Finally, as appendices, I would put chapters about the tools:
> The Compiler <-- some more details about it
> The Linker <-- name mangling, etc
> Creating interface files, etc
>
> I think this organization would make much more sense, and would 
> make a
> wonderful book.
>
> I hope this helps.