From: David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com>
Rob Stewart <stewart@sig.com> writes:
From: David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com>
"Jeff Garland" <jeff@crystalclearsoftware.com> writes:
Make that a micro-tutorial then. It's supposed to be just enough to get an idea.
Just putting the library list no longer fits on a single page. We already have libraries by category.
Yep. It would be long.
It will only get longer and that makes it harder to find what's really interesting on each occasion you visit that page.
The particular page being proposed isn't about "finding what's really interesting." It's more like a magazine about Boost and its capabilities that you can browse through to get familiar with what's there.
I think you mistook my meaning. I meant that folks would revisit the page periodically to learn about libraries they didn't pay attention to previously. I may also have misunderstood the page you envision, but it sounds to me like a really long page with library after library of text and example code, with one mostly just running into the next. If you meant there would be a TOC with links to each library and especially if you meant there would be some sort of grouping, then it will probably work reasonably.
Yet another idea would be to have a single page library teaser, including code example, linked available from the library list. So a few sentences of intro text and some code examples as a really fast intro that people could scan to get the gist of the library in action.
That is in the same ballpark as what I suggested. However, having to click through to the material will make it harder for a user to get an overall picture of what's in Boost.
Tabbed browsing makes that palatable, even useful.
I don't think many users would read through one big page of such teasers, though.
No they wouldn't; they'd skip over the ones that were clearly of no interest. The page down key works nicely.
It works nicely until you get tired of paging past uninteresting parts.
Maybe an all-encompassing example that uses most of the libraries would work.
NooooooooooO. Please, no! That would introduce all kinds of interactions and complexity. The idea is to give people an easy way to find out "what each library does."
OK. OK. It was just an idea to make it possible to show synergy among the libraries and to give a glimpse of what each can do.
IOW, the example could build from a simple idea to a full program that uses most libraries with a brief mention of why each exists and how it would apply to the example.
To understand that you have to read through the whole thing. That defeats the purpose.
As I saw it, that example would make for interesting -- even compelling -- reading and would give incentive to keep reading to learn about all of the libraries. Also as I saw it, yours was a longer read without cohesiveness. Now I think you just mean to provide a small example with a little explanatory text with each listed library rather than the one-liner now present. -- Rob Stewart stewart@sig.com Software Engineer http://www.sig.com Susquehanna International Group, LLP using std::disclaimer;