"Edward Diener" <eddielee@tropicsoft.com> writes:
From these topics I would guess that a good overview before your chapter 3 would entail a basic explanation of:
1.4.1 1.4.2 2.2 2.3 2.6 2.7
That looks good.
and anything related to them regarding values and types you want to say. I would leave out all but the simplest examples showing exactly what you mean and just explain the ideas.
That's what we thought we were doing in the book! ;-) Concision is hard.
What I am simple saying is that if you want to make it fairly easy for the non-experienced MPL programmer to pick up the MPL library you will include some material about the information above. I could even say to you, although it is purely your and Mr. Gurtovoy's choice, that you might think of making chapters 1 and 2 available online as you have chapter 3.
It's not up to us; Addison-Wesley owns the material and I doubt they'd be willing to let us do that.
Of course you may well feel that by doing this you are giving away what you feel you should earn via book sales, as well it may be that your book contract does not allow this anyway.
Bingo.
I do think that it is possible to understand your MPL library without the information in chapters 1 and 2, but that it becomes more difficult, and more work, for the beginning MPL programmer to do so.
I agree.
Personally I get discouraged when documentation does not give me a good overview of concepts, not because I think that I can not pick up the information if I were willing to investigate and work at it but because I get annoyed that those who are doing good work are not providing me with the information I need to make learning easier.
It is reasonable to expect the basic concepts to be defined.
Perhaps I am not in the majority, but my view of the importance of good documentation is not that of the majority either. I realize that both you and Mr. Gurtovy may be tired of explaining MPL now that you have written a book about it, and documented it in the Boost MPL reference, to write anything more.
I little.
I can only say to you that you put yourself in the place of programmers who may be interested in your ideas, who are intelligent, who follow the Boost libraries, but do not know what you do about metaprogramming and how you designed the library to make it easier for people to metaprogramming in C++. If you think you have given enough, fine.
If you include the book, I think we have. But I do think the website needs to cover a few of the basic concepts we've left out. I even think it would help book sales to include more information.
If not, consider one more effort at a basic number of pages of introduction, perhaps very few in number and very basic, which leads programmers to be interested in your ideas. Thanks for listening !
Whew. I wonder when there will be time? -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com