Re: OT: Nomad programmer needs tools

On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 20:16:09 -0700, Rune Allnor wrote:
Again, I'm of that generation (I was born before man first set foot on
the
moon...) who tend to prefer books. Online stuff is OK when you want to
find out the order or format of the arguments to some function. For
reading,
I prefer text on paper.

I'm not as young as all that: I remember hearing the moon landing on the
radio, myself.

In this particular case, though, the issue is/was just that the on-line
class API documentation is well structured and heavily hyperlinked, and I
found that invaluable. Because of the hierarchial nature of class
inheritance, you don't really want to be repeating documentation for base
class methods and members in the description of each derived class, but
when you're learning the system, you do need to easily get to those
definitions quickly. Clicking on a "supplied by base class" link, or
using the multi-frame indexes walks all over any paper reference manual,
IMO. Unlike a tutorial, there's no linear narative that could
meaningfully be imposed on the reference.

Sure, for tutorials, paper could be the way to go. I got more out of
"Just Java2", faster, than I did from the collection of tutorials on the
web, and it was all up-to-date. I found, though, that it didn't take the
book/tutorial long to get me into the "Java mind-set", at which point I
found the API reference more useful. I think that happened by the time I
was about a third of the way through the book.

Cheers,

--
Andrew

.

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