On Tue, 2009-01-20 at 10:44 +0000, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
2009/1/20 Karl Lattimer <karl qdh org uk>:On Tue, 2009-01-20 at 09:44 +0700, Hans Baier wrote:I still have a long way to learn Vala. Since someone is successfully using Vala in a number of projects I think they already have a good knowledge of common pitfalls, best practices and the like.Writing a book is one of the most efficient ways to learn. Believe me, that is how I learnt linux. Just start, it doesnt have to be perfact in the beginning. It can grow over time. That is how open source happens....I've actually been thinking about this. I've discovered an awful lot since I've been writing in vala and meandered my way through a tonne of vapi. If someone wants to help build a draft and table of contents with me we could start a joint effort and try and get it published at some point.Count on me as well to write some content. I actually think, that it would be really nice to do a good GNOME (as in the platform) Tutorial based in Vala. Teaching how to create a GNOME app from the ground up (using GtkBuilder, database access, creating .desktop files, HAL...). Note that with Vala you don't have to care about a lot of stuff, which leave us some room to teach good GNOME development practices. Also, we could take the chance to do proper ilustration, I miss that a lot in the rest of the GNOME docs. The main loop, events, signals, and DBus could be explained much better with proper ilustration. I can help a bit here, but I'm sure others in the GNOME artist community could help with this. Most GNOME docs sucks big time, the Gtk+ Tutorial for example, is more a widget-by-widget manual rather than a proper tutorial on how to create an app. Luca, count on me to write some stuff and help with the content index if someone else (you?) leads the effort (meaning, doing brown dispatching and reminding people to complete their parts of the book ;-).
If we're going to do this as a team I suggest that we outline a strategy before we begin. Here are some chapters we'd want to consider, I'm starting off with ones which I'd be happy to write; * Custom Widgets * Cairo & Pango * GTK Applications * File handling * Database applications * Language introduction & reference * DBus * Common pitfalls and caveats (reserved words and similar) * GObject from a vala perspective * Nicely formatted API reference for all available vapi * Translation Please append to this list ;) Within the chapter structure there would have to be an over-arching theme, I suggest what we do is take a single example application which has a requirement to touch a large proportion of vala, gtk, cairo, sqlite/mysql and more and produces a simple fun application that is actually useful. Essentially I suggest we gear it towards a how we made this application. Anyone else have any thoughts on this kind of approach? BR, K
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