Dan Schafer's book

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richmond62
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Dan Schafer's book

Post by richmond62 »

As Dan Schafer has left the building and his book seems to be out of print
I will leave you to wrestle with your conscience:

https://fdocuments.in/download/software ... dan-shafer
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Dan Schafer's book

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

Just wondering what "left the building and his book seems to be out of print" means?
Did he leave his mortal coil? Put this work into the public domain?

I enjoyed (so far) reading the forward by Ro Nagey, the historical bits there.

Thanks for the link.
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richmond62
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Re: Dan Schafer's book

Post by richmond62 »

Dan Schafer died, unfortunately.
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Dan Schafer's book

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

richmond62 wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 11:59 am Dan Schafer died, unfortunately.
Oh, that is unfortunate.

His work might serve as a good template for a new user guide though, it's a bit dated.
I like how he had all the related keywords grouped together so you can see the available options for your scripts.
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richmond62
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Re: Dan Schafer's book

Post by richmond62 »

Well, one of my criticisms of the in-built Dictionary, is that it is very good
IFF you know what you are looking for and know what the term is.

For things such as "How do I navigate between cards?" it is useless.

If LiveCode really wants to lay claim to being "self-teachable" it has to do better than that.
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Dan Schafer's book

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

richmond62 wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 4:17 pm Well, one of my criticisms of the in-built Dictionary, is that it is very good
IFF you know what you are looking for and know what the term is.

For things such as "How do I navigate between cards?" it is useless.

If LiveCode really wants to lay claim to being "self-teachable" it has to do better than that.
For one of the next goals I'm looking at the guide that is PDF included with the IDE. That PDF is auto-generated from markdown files, so it's not actually designed in a printing-oriented page layout program like Adobe Indesign. As someone who's worked in the printing industry for three decades, I don't like that, but it's better than nothing I suppose.
As for lessons, there are plenty of lessons web pages on LC's site as well as a few others site such as those Brigham Young University pages, I think the problem is new users don't seem to be able to find those pages for some reason.

While digging through the GitHub repos, I did see that there is documentation for making those "Guided Tours" interactive lessons, which when they released it I thought that was a great idea for helping new users get started, but beyond the "Hello Word" and the three others included, there doesn't seem to be much of anything that's been done with it since. Maybe if there was some sort of "recording" mechanism that could record an IDE session and then automatically generate these movie-like lesson-scripts, then community could easily add a lot of those. I was thinking of trying to make a few of those for the using widgets, building and installing Builder extensions and few other things.

Alternatively, I'm a fan of screen-cast / video lessons on YouTube.
I think making an OpenXTalk YouTube channel for such things is a very good idea.
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