On Thursday 04 October 2012 13:20:00 Dave Abrahams wrote:
The question remains: "how do I learn/teach this library?" If I can't answer those questions, I also can't answer the question
How do I use this library?
I don't understand how other people have arrived at answers for themselves.
[snip]
Look, I teach classes on Boost. If Boost.Test is not learnable and teachable, I have to tell my students to stay away from it. That's embarrassing for me, and bad for Boost.
Although I'm not teaching students, I can understand the difficulties you're talking about. However, you have to admit by the answers in this thread that many people managed to learn the library and use it extensively. Boost is not exclusively about teachability and learnability; I see practical usefullness as a key feature of Boost libraries (and I'm not discarding teachability and learnability by that) and Boost.Test has been useful for years. You can't just throw it away with no fallback. As for me, I'm not using any advanced features of the library. I gathered the knowledge of the basic usage from the docs (mostly tutorial, I guess) and source code. I can't say this was easy but it was doable and enough for my needs. I know this is not the kind of learning one can recommend to studends, so clearly the library could be improved in this regard.