From: Marnen Laibow-Koser <marnen@...>
Date: 2010-02-12T07:14:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Exit method?

Josh Cheek wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Marnen Laibow-Koser 
> <marnen@marnen.org>wrote:
> 
>> If you need to ask the mailing list a question like this, then you are
>> not ready to be writing Ruby tutorials.  Sorry, but that's the way it
>> is.
>> Best,
>>
> 
> I'm not sure that this is true. Sometimes, when the person writing the
> tutorial has a very firm commanding of the subject matter, they gloss 
> over
> the kinds of things that trip up newbies. To someone well versed in 
> Ruby,
> exit is so obvious that they probably don't think to address it.

Quite true.  I certainly didn't know the answer off the top of my head 
-- but I *knew where to look it up*.  My point -- which perhaps I should 
have made more clearly was that the OP didn't know the answer, and 
apparently didn't know where to look for the answer.  That pretty 
clearly says to me that the OP should not be creating tutorials.
> 
> I was tutoring a student at my school for "Problem Solving and 
> Programming
> in C" (CS211, first programming course) and he was struggling with 
> things
> like figuring out where his files were, simple syntax, understanding
> prototypes, understanding that functions can't see eachother's data. 
> Things
> I would not have focused on if I were writing a tutorial, things the 
> course
> probably gave a cursory explanation to.
> 

Yeah.  But I don't think this is the same sort of situation.

> When you are just starting out with something, you have a steep slope 
> ahead
> of you, and only after you climb over it will you have the foundation of
> knowledge necessary to understand most of the available resources.
> 
> I'm trying to learn Clojure right now, and getting started was very
> frustrating, there were things the Clojure book just says, that I needed
> specific steps and examples for, but the author thought that just 
> telling me
> to do something was enough. So I had to do a lot of work and a lot of
> digging, and consider quitting several times, because the perspective of 
> the
> author was so different from my perspective.
> 
> So I think there may be a case for tutorials for newbies by newbies, 
> because
> the things that trip up the tutorial's author are the kinds of things 
> the
> author is going to emphasize, and these are much more likely to be the 
> kinds
> of things that the readers will also be struggling with. When you don't 
> know
> anything, and you figure something out for the first time, you know
> firsthand what the hurdles are for someone in your situation, and so if 
> your
> readers are in that same situation, then the tutorial's subject matter, 
> and
> emphases are more relevant to them.
> 
> This is my hypothesis. It might be useful to have Charlie ask some of 
> the
> people he is writing the tutorial for to use a different tutorial by 
> someone
> with more knowledge, and see how effective each was (ie gather some
> empirical data to test the hypothesis).

Best,
-- 
Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
marnen@marnen.org
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.