Forum: Nitro New Tutorial PDF

I'm not all the way through with bringing this up to date, but it's
better then before so here goes.


(ab)

Great stuff ;-)

-g.

Hey Ame :-)

I like the tutorial idea -- I took a shot at something on a wiki page
before.  You can see that I have my own faults, so my comments are 
purely
for "better-ness", and good.  Also I'm putting on my "adult trainer and
workplace assessor" hat (not a programs need, XXX hat *grin*).

Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.  On Friday I took some 
time
out of my life to find a few little toys to use to explain "classroom
psychology" .... It is impossible to find "human" toy men and toy women
these days.

I did find :: little 'magno-z <http://haireemagnoz.com/home.htm>' men --
made from coloured pipe cleaners with funny faces and weird hair.  They 
are
pretty cool, I plan to get some more.

   - http://haireemagnoz.com/home.htm

Consider these people as "the audience"; for your material.  I like it
because I can sit with Chinese people, or Americans, and say :: Here is 
your
class.  Here is your market.  Here is your (project/sports) team  . . .

   - What do they KNOW already?
        (Foundation...)
   - What pre-conceptions do they hold (NOW)?
   ... "Rails rules", "Google and NASA love Python", C++ is the fastest,
   etc
   - What THREE(3) things do I wish them to walk out of the room with?
   - What  ONE(1) thing do I wish them to do, to ACT on, after class
   (tutorial, advertisement, etc.)

This understood, I tend to do that evaluation 2nd, or even 3rd (or -- I 
used
to).  It really matter-z.  Those wee
'magno-z<http://haireemagnoz.com/home.htm>'
figure men/women -- Don't know where they can get to after our tutorial.
Make sense?

There seem to be many assumptions in the tutorial.  And I was not sure 
What
"assumed knowledge" I might need.  Ordinarily most of that context can 
be
gathered.  NITRO, to me, is for non-database people to get something
up-and-running.

I spent a very large chunk of my life looking for ways to deliver 
results,
and skip the technical gear, and ins and outs. I may be taking a 
too-Right
brained approach to this tutorial in that case.

On the other hand, I'd like to see a real-world version of any data
structures used and where possible, a diagram or 30 diagrams. ;-)  If 
you
rec all where you began, "they"(tm) used to tell us to imagine 
explaining
the dumbest steps to boil rice.

Do I know how to "fetch water"?  Does the wee
'magno-z<http://haireemagnoz.com/home.htm>'
figure?

Also ... my personal bias here is that, is a To Do list sufficiently 
real
enough?  It needs to be described as a thing I'm familiar with.  Most 
"to
do"-s are on envelopes.  Can you make it a task tracking project?  I 
think I
used an address book -- I saw your phone-number question, are we 
thinking
the same thing?

Finally, you need a unbiased person with the equivalent "assumed" 
knowledge
to review the tutorial.  Can you teach/use it to, with a friend or a
non-family member?

Before you  do this write out those 3 objectives, and at teh end find a
suitable question to ask and assess how that goes.  Do not give the 
desired
outcome away in the assessment question *grin*

I CC-ed my friend Gayle, she knows not much on computers, she knows 
about
training adults.  I think I "know too much" to give an unbiased review. 
I
know OG is a step beyond everything except a 4GL or NeXT.

If you can get them, George's videos are excellent examples for a first
Nitro app.  Non-trivial and simple as pie.  I wrote step-by-step 
expose-s on
the first and second ones.  That got lost in the "non-wiki" on 
nitro.org.

Because a lot does happen in Nitro "by magick", it is much more 
important to
explain the dumb, trite, and "obviously" stuff such that the 
reader/student
gets to take in ALL he/she gets with Nitro, or Og, for free.

*  Why n ot have a "Og" tutorial first -- and then you can point people 
to
the Og tutorial first.  And keep the Nitro tutorial mostly about Nitro 
and
about the web sites.

Good luck, let us know where we may assist.

... Will






On 09/12/2007, Arne Brasseur <arne@arnebrasseur.net> wrote: I'm not all 
the
way through with bringing this up to date, but it's
better then before so here goes.


(ab)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Arne Brasseur <arne@arnebrasseur.net>
Date: 9 Dec 2007 21:46
Subject: [Nitro] New Tutorial PDF
To: General discussion about Nitro <nitro-general@rubyforge.org>

I'm not all the way through with bringing this up to date, but it's
better then before so here goes.

Hi William,

Thank you for your not very to the point yet constructive comments. ;) I
see where you are getting at, I just would like to clarify my current
stance, given the current situation and what I see as priorities
documentation-wise.

This tutorial is aimed at people that know how to program, have a
working knowledge of HTML/CSS, have at least used a bit of Ruby before
and know what RDBMS stands for. In time more documentation will be
written which might cater for others. For now I think it makes most
sense to write like geeks like myself that might know their stuff but
just don't know about Nitro, since these are the people we want to
convert to the /light side of the force/. As more Jedis complete their
training the force will grow stronger and it will become possible for
mere mortals to tap into its infinite possibilities.

I personally would rather die than read another tutorial that tells me
how to get water. I understand that there are people that need to be
told where to get the water, what container to bring, how to fill it,
etc. There are also many people that hit the "back" button once they
realise they will be told, again, where the water is.

The Todolist is a simple example with one model, one controller. The
simplest thinkable besides "hello, world". More tutorials will be
written, in time.

(ab)

* William schreef: