Even though I have a background in VB programming, I found the Tutorial
very helpful, primarily because my learning style is such that I find
specific examples generally more helpful than pages of general theory,
and the most helpful specific example of all for me is the full-fledged
application built from the ground up, step by step. I thought that the
Tutorial was a great stepping-stone to the User's Guide and Language
Reference, about which I am not equally fond (especially the Language
Reference).
One complaint I have regarding the REALbasic documentation in general,
however, is the use of PDF format (or perhaps the specific way in which
PDF is used), which I find greatly hampers the user. I realize that you
can "drag and drop" specific examples of code from the Language
Reference into your own code, but for me I like to "copy and paste"
other text selections as well. Using the Language Reference in the IDE,
for example, is a frustration: you can see text on the screen that
you'd like to highlight, copy, paste, and put in a text file for further
study (or even place as a comment right in your program), but it's
impossible to do that.
When I load the PDF Language Reference directly into Adobe Acrobat (and
the same is true for the Tutorial), I have a similar frustrating
inability to "copy and paste." Now, I am using Acrobat 5.0 rather than
the latest version, so that could be part of the problem. If it is,
I'll be glad to hear that the limitation is so easy to correct (i.e., by
my getting a more recent version of Acrobat).
But for now I try to do different things, only to find that I can't.
For example, Edit/Find works, but you can't copy and paste what you do
find. You can print out a particular page (I wonder if I can get it to
print to disk?), but there's no way to print out selected text (logical
enough, since there is no way to select text!).
Sometimes companies use PDF format because it guards against misuse of
the material, but I find that it also hampers legitimate use by the
legitimate user. In this important area, the Visual Basic help system
is, I think, friendlier. If the limitations I've mentioned are due to
my own ignorance or to my using an earlier version of Acrobat, then,
again, I'll be glad to hear that, but there may be other REALbasic users
who are experiencing a similar frustration to mine.
Getting back to the Tutorial, my next comment is probably a quibble. It
is great to see such a full-fledged editor developed, step by step, that
is the equivalent of Microsoft's WordPad, but it would also be nice if
that editor were able in Windows to save a file in plain text format
rather than only RTF format. Otherwise it's useless for HTML files and
other text files. A program isn't better than a plain text editor if it
can't also do what a plain text editor can do. This is a very minor
deficiency that should be simple to fix, and the result would be a text
editor adaptable to many purposes (simply by adding appropriate menu
items and Methods to match).
What could be strengthened also, I think, is the information on handling
the reading and writing of files. Rather than using
.SaveStyledEditField Method alone, perhaps a more general approach would
have been helpful. I'm not talking about anything as detailed as
chapter 8 of the User's Guide, but opening and saving files is
fundamental to the operation of an editor program, so perhaps it would
be good to include in the Tutorial more than what is said, e.g., on page
36 of the Tutorial.
In general, again, I like the Tutorial very much. If people don't need
it because of their background in computer programming, fine: let them
simply ignore it, and let the rest of us benefit from it. I think Joe
Strout underestimates the time required to work through it (I certainly
couldn't do it in an hour), but he's right in emphasizing its general
helpfulness. It got me to the point where I could write a full-length
program in REALbasic from scratch (well, I did build on Joe's source
code for his 3D chess demo, with his permission). (I also got a lot of
help from the questions I asked on the REALbasic mail lists, but the
Tutorial got me grounded.)
Re-reading what I've written, it sounds much more negative than I
intended it to be. When you critique something, you tend to concentrate
on what can be improved rather than on what is already being done and
being done well. And people will have more suggestions for improvement
than can be implemented without losing some of the strengths the
Tutorial already has. If you add this detail or that detail (database
management, or simply more detail on file handling), it ceases to be a
Tutorial _introducing_ newcomers to REALbasic. If there are changes,
let them not be major ones. (Instead, as someone suggested, come out
with additional tutorials focusing on more specialized aspects.)
Barry Traver
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