"Tom Melly" <tom### [at] tomandlucouk> wrote in message
news:3e56432a$1@news.povray.org...
<snip>
> IMHO the manual would benefit from more redundancies based on workflow and
> common-sense - though I hasten to add that this is largely a criticism of
human
> beings rather than the manual.


I agree with this, Tom.

The manual has to serve several different audiences. I think what has been
written meets the needs of most newbies very well; certainly I've found it
was easy to use the SDL before I was really fluent with it. But my
background in Perl and other languages does get in the way a little, in that
sometimes my assumptions about how the SDL works and the philosophy that
organizes POV gets in my way.

An added section of cross references for those who come to POV from a
programming background could be very helpful. If there was a section
entitled "Especially for Programmers New To POV" I would have read that
before any other part of the manual, and I think that would be true for any
other programmer, too. That would be a good place to say that in the SDL
philosophy functions are organized by their return type, describe how POV
macros differ from keyboard macros and subroutine calls, and so on. Such
material should not replace what has been written, but should be added as an
appendix.

In the meantime, like the guy who couldn't find "strlen" even though he had
correctly guessed its name, I anticipate asking the occasionally stupid
question... because sometimes I'm jumping around in the manual to figure out
how to do one particular thing in an area I don't plan to study until later,
so I miss some cues that I would have otherwise seen.


--
Will Woodhull
Thornhenge, SW Oregon, USA
willl.at.thornhenge.net

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