thanks for your opinion,
you are right up to some point with that,..but assuming the product is only for people who know Basic language is wrong. If one doesn't know what the IF THEN ELSE structure is, then you are right, he probably should reach to the general programing languages books, but if someone came from COBOL for example and never used VB, then must find some information how to use the tool. The language reference part of B4A is fine, I'm not complaining about it at all, but the general information to grasp the idea of how the IDE along with libraries and implementation of the Classes and methods could be greatly improved. I'm glad there are some user developed examples to study (but it is to early to share my opinion about that).
The problem here is two-fold. Everybody who is more than a beginner wants new features, and everybody who is a beginner wants to learn as much as possible in the shortest possible time frame. That creates a little conflict of interests. There has to be a balance. If there is not, then either the tool advancement will be slow, or the user accumulation will be slow which in turn make the product die after some months or years (and believe me I've seen that several times happen). Marketing and managing a product is not an easy job, and if somebody is a great person and top notch developer working on the tool advancement like a horse, doesn't necessarily mean success in a long run. it all depends on the management skills which are as important as programing.
The answer to the question how the new user supposed to learn using the product is a matter of speculation and there are probably many different opinions, as everybody is different and has his own preferred methods.
In my opinion the documentation cold be aimed for people who:
- came from other than Basic programing languages (Assembler, C++, cobol, Forthran, Pascal, C#, Clarion, W, PHP, AS400, JS, Java, Batch, CShell, etc. and not all those languages are O.O.)
- those who used VB and alike (and I understand those people will have probably the least problem to grasp all this)
- those who never written any code anything (and here sending them to 3rd party tutorials will be absolutely OK)
Now base on the group the user is coming from there should be different methods to introduce that user to the product, and most of all make him happy developer. There are those who love to code, and there are those who want the job done ASAP, there are those who used pretty basic tools in the past (and did lots of coding - so they don't mind more coding), and there are those who did very little coding (because of the advanced 4GL tools they used, which did not require writing that much code). VB as a development platform is not the top of the line ins sense of productivity and this is known fact. I decided to use B4A simply because I haven't found anything better (although I know there are several tools under development now), or those I have found were pretty expensive.
Arthur
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Arthur
