In article <3A22BBC6.189ABC83@aol.com>, j charter <jrc### [at] aolcom> 
wrote:

>Because example code can help make an intuitive leap that straight 
>documentation of syntax may not: how to actually use the syntax to get 
>a specific result.  Manuals may or may not include example code, ( and 
>the povray manual includes a generous amount), but tutorials 
>necessaily do.

Also, manuals do not always, even when they include code, actually 
include *verified* code. Even the (in my opinion wonderful) POV 
documentation has had some time-wasting errors in the code examples. 
(One that cost me a bit of time was an example for, I think, the 
checkers pattern; their code sample "worked" because, while it was 
incorrect, the two colors it appeared to choose were the two colors that 
showed up--but that's because those two colors were the defaults. 
Replace those two colors in the sample with any other colors, and the 
defaults continued to show up. Took a while (and a post to this 
newsgroup) for me to figure that one out.)

Tutorials have a tendency to discuss a single issue in depth; such an 
error is unlikely to show up in a tutorial on pigment patterns, because 
the tutorial would have chosen multiple colors to show how the pattern 
can be changed.

(In my tutorials, I actually link each image to the exact code used to 
produce that image.)

Jerry
-- 
http://www.hoboes.com/jerry/
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you've
depleted the lake."--It Isn't Murder If They're Yankees
(http://www.hoboes.com/jerry/Murder/)

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