Thanks for you answers! I'm aware of the books on the pharo.org/documentation page. But for me that is not sufficient. I'm currently playing around while programming my fist own and unguided application. It will be quite simple, just a reminder application where notes can be added, removed, edited and all of them should trigger a notification when they are due. I plan to save all notes in a SQLite database, display is done with spec. While this is basic stuff I often have to go into the source and search for the correct messages to send and to see what kind of return objects I get. For example I wanted to use a SortedCollection as data structure for my notes (consisting of a string and a date) that should be ordered by date, so since this is not really described in the Pharo by Example book I looked at the implementation and searched online. It would be definitely better to just have only or in the image a full documentation for SortedCollection which links to a full documentation of OrderedCollection. I have to confess I didn't read Pharo in depth and Pharo for Enterpise yet but I also don't think its convenient to have all the books open and search there for documentation. Since I think a full searchable documentation would be very helpful especially for beginners and I definitely would like to have one I would be happy to contribute. Are there already some efforts toward it or does somebody has an idea how to accomplish that? Right now I imagine the best thing would be to have an automated workflow to read out the comments of the current release somehow and presenting them online. Maybe it would need to write a parser to get them well formatted (so that example code looks like code and so on). So if there is any way that I can contribute, I will do. Best, Julius -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Essential-Documentation-tp4916861p4916904.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

In this problem/project custom learning path now I'm learning better packaging and exploring the Spec-Glamour interface. Cheers, Offray On 26/09/16 19:40, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote:

Julius,

On the interactive documentation front I'm working in a project called Grafoscopio. Now it has a translated English main page at [1]. Is not for writing code documentation, but for writing tutorials, books and alike that mix prose, code, data and visualizations, think in something similar to Mathematica or Jupyter notebooks, but with an outline structure to hold a complete book (instead of the common pile of files inside folders approach) or support complex explorative writing/computing. See an example of this at [2]. It can also produce pdf outputs (via pandoc), like the two draft documents at [3] and [4], made in grafoscopio

[1] http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html [2] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/panama-papers-1 [3] http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/grafoscopio/doc/tip/Docs/Es/Articulos/Libert... [4] http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/piamed/doc/tip/Libro/libro.pdf

My approach to build such app was to start with the simplest prototype, using Glamorous Toolkit [5] and reading the useful chapters of Deep into Pharo [6] about Glamour (chap. 10), Files with the FileSystem (chap. 3) Versioning Your Code with Monticello (chap 7), Gofer: Scripting Package Loading (chap 8), the paper on ston [7] and then the Agile Visualization Book [8] and ask questions in this mailing list. I skipped the Pharo by example book, because the game building approach was not what I wanted/needed, so I filled a lot of gaps in my knowledge with the recent Pharo MOOC [9].

[5] http://gtoolkit.org/ [6] http://deepintopharo.com/ [7] https://github.com/svenvc/ston/blob/master/ston-paper.md [8] http://agilevisualization.com/ [9] http://files.pharo.org/mooc/

As you can see my learning process was problem/project oriented and that was the path I followed to build my "essential documentation". Being the only Smalltalker active in my country (AFAIK) was kind of difficult, but in the virtual space you can find a community that is welcoming, proactive and responsive most of the time. Now I'm trying to enlarge the community by serving a different public (non-programmers like me) that are interested in data storytelling, visualization and (h)ac(k)tivism ( journalists, non computer science academics, activist, philosophers, etc).

So even if Pharo doesn't have the classical documentation, the community around it, the documentation and the environment, can support alternative learning paths, driven by exploration and problem solving and I hope you can find a place and path here for your project.

Welcome here Julius,

Offray

On 23/09/16 11:16, julius wrote:

...

Probably this is a very beginners question but is there a documentation online or within the Pharo image for all the base-framework components like all collections, Morphic, Numbers and so on?

I know Pharo uses a lot the 'see and discover yourself' approach but sometimes, especially for beginners it would be nice to have a documentation for most classes and also have programming guides. Coming from macOS and iOS development I think about something like Swift or Objective-C has. For example you have every class there documented but also you have programming guides for how to draw graphics. It would be really helpful to have somthing like that for example for Voyage (maybe it's there but I did not found it).

Thanks for helping me out! Julius

-- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Essential-Documentation-tp4916861.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Hi, On 27/09/16 09:17, julius wrote:

Thanks for all replies and the good advice. Grafoscopio looks impressive and very interesting!

Thanks. There is still a lot of work to be done and code to be improved, but is getting more maturity. Still I would like to make some videos showing the new characteristics on sharing and storing playgrounds inside a notebook.

After working more and more with Pharo I see and understand the approach to documentation better I think. So my next steps will be finishing the application I'm writing and documenting that, also if I see class comments that are hard to understand I will report them, maybe even try to improve them myself.

That would be very worthy. Cheers, Offray