Re: Gtk::perl documentation?

[Stephen Wilhelm <swilhelm computer org>]

On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 11:22, Tom Jennings wrote:
> Now Stephen Wilhelm's toot
> http://personal.riverusers.com/~swilhelm/gtkperl-tutorial/index.html
> is great because it describes Gtk in terms of *what it does*; 'buttons
> and boxes relate like so'. (The examples are a big help obviously). He
> shows what widgets have in common, etc; it's specifically *not* an
> alphabetical listing of function calls, which is all the ref provides.
> Once I have an idea what a bunch of functions *do*, then I can rummage
> around in the ref for specifics and trivia.
>
> At this point I'm either just grousing, or wishing :-) Mostly wishing, I
> hope, since there's not a Big Document that I'm missing. Alas, I'm not
> an interface sorta person (system & hardware work mostly) so I'll never
> be able to devote the time necessary to extend the tutorial.

Glad you found the tutorial helpful.  Just so that everyone knows, I do
intend to update it for the Gtk2 release, but I have been rather busy
lately.  I work as a contractor for the Army, and the Afghanistan/Iraq
thing has been keeping me pretty busy, and I may get busier soon (there
is a very real chance of getting deployed to Kuwait).

I had hoped to have the tutorial finished before a stable release of
Gtk2-Perl appeared, so that everyone here would have time to point out
minor mistakes or make some suggestions, but that no longer appears
possible.  I will get the work done as soon as I can, however.  It will
be much better organized.  The current tutorial has been enhanced so
much since it started, that it is  now too large to be considered just a
"tutorial", so I am going to call it "Programming Gtk2-Perl".  I plan on
creating a small tutorial section, just covering what a widget is, how
you use them, how to attach signals, and other basic concepts.  After
that I hope to have a widget semi-reference with examples (similar to
how most of the current tutorial is) and then maybe a more advanced
section.  I even have a crazy idea about publishing it both on the web
and in book form, but I don't know how appealing such a thing would be
to a publisher.

In the meantime, I too think it would be great if there were more forms
of documentation available.  A single tutorial, no matter how good,
can't cover everything.  There is much that can be done, including small
tutorials that deal specifically with some subcategory of Gtk2-Perl
(such as custom widgets or even Gdk drawing primitives), write-ups about
the differences between Gtk2-Perl and Gtk-Perl or betwen Gtk2-Perl and
its C interface, and much more.  Documentation is a lot of work, but I
find that it's worth it when you get flooded with appreciative e-mails.

And I would like to thank Goran, muppet, Guillaume, and all the others
who have worked hard on Gtk2-Perl.  It is looking pretty good, keep up
the great work!  I wish I could have played a part in it all.

-- 
Stephen Wilhelm
See my Gtk-Perl Tutorial at
    http://personal.riverusers.com/~swilhelm/gtkperl-tutorial/