I believe one of the things D needs right now is more documentation. Therefore, I started writing a tutorial.

It is aimed at people who can already program well in other languages. This means nothing about loops or structs, because I expect most people to know this stuff. I do not consider D to be a language for beginners anyways.

It is aiming for pragmatic not comprehensive advice. For example, I mostly ignore LDC and GDC except for the optimization chapter.

Since I am working on Linux exclusively and I like the command line, I cannot teach to Windows users. Sorry.

This is still very incomplete and my our newborn family member requires quite some attention. So expect this to develop with glacial speed. ;)

Nevertheless, I want to put this version 0.1 out to get some feedback. What do you think about the topic selection? What topics are missing? Serious errors so far?

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/d-tut-0.1/index.html

Wreck it! :)

On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 19:18:40 UTC, qznc wrote:
> I believe one of the things D needs right now is more documentation. Therefore, I started writing a tutorial.
>
> It is aimed at people who can already program well in other languages. This means nothing about loops or structs, because I expect most people to know this stuff. I do not consider D to be a language for beginners anyways.
>
> It is aiming for pragmatic not comprehensive advice. For example, I mostly ignore LDC and GDC except for the optimization chapter.
>
> Since I am working on Linux exclusively and I like the command line, I cannot teach to Windows users. Sorry.
>
> This is still very incomplete and my our newborn family member requires quite some attention. So expect this to develop with glacial speed. ;)
>
> Nevertheless, I want to put this version 0.1 out to get some feedback. What do you think about the topic selection? What topics are missing? Serious errors so far?
>
> http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/d-tut-0.1/index.html
>
> Wreck it! :)

Looks very nice, not much content yet but I will continue to check it out from time to time to see if I can make any suggestions.

One minor nit-pick.  On the page:

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/d-tut-0.1/philosophy.html

while I got a chuckle out of "D is what C++ wanted to be.", I might omit this. Insulting C++ isn't likely a great way to attract the C++ crowd, which is one of our major target audiences.

Good work,
Craig

On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 19:34:11 UTC, Craig Dillabaugh wrote:
> while I got a chuckle out of "D is what C++ wanted to be.", I might omit this. Insulting C++ isn't likely a great way to attract the C++ crowd, which is one of our major target audiences.

Quite the contrary, I can't really imagine many good C++ developers who don't insult this language on their own :) Its problems are quite well-known and widely accepted.

Though saying that D already _is_ what C++ wanted to be is a bit ambitious. Probably more appropriate is to say that it was one of main motivations / design goals.

On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 19:18:40 UTC, qznc wrote:
> Wreck it! :)

The only thing that I don't like about it so far is that it's not on wiki.dlang.org. If you put it there it will be easier for learners to discover it, and for the rest of us to help writing it.

On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 19:18:40 UTC, qznc wrote:
> I believe one of the things D needs right now is more documentation. Therefore, I started writing a tutorial.
>
> It is aimed at people who can already program well in other languages. This means nothing about loops or structs, because I expect most people to know this stuff. I do not consider D to be a language for beginners anyways.
>
> It is aiming for pragmatic not comprehensive advice. For example, I mostly ignore LDC and GDC except for the optimization chapter.
>
> Since I am working on Linux exclusively and I like the command line, I cannot teach to Windows users. Sorry.
>
> This is still very incomplete and my our newborn family member requires quite some attention. So expect this to develop with glacial speed. ;)
>
> Nevertheless, I want to put this version 0.1 out to get some feedback. What do you think about the topic selection? What topics are missing? Serious errors so far?
>
> http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/d-tut-0.1/index.html
>
> Wreck it! :)

I like it that you quote people from the forum with real situations, and even provide links of the discussion.

On 10/7/13 12:47 PM, Dicebot wrote:
> On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 19:34:11 UTC, Craig Dillabaugh wrote:
>> while I got a chuckle out of "D is what C++ wanted to be.", I might
>> omit this. Insulting C++ isn't likely a great way to attract the C++
>> crowd, which is one of our major target audiences.
>
> Quite the contrary, I can't really imagine many good C++ developers who
> don't insult this language on their own :) Its problems are quite
> well-known and widely accepted.
>
> Though saying that D already _is_ what C++ wanted to be is a bit
> ambitious. Probably more appropriate is to say that it was one of main
> motivations / design goals.

I agree that the definition is a tad offensive to some, and inaccurate. It also gratuitously frames in a limiting way D's charter itself. I don't think C++ has ever aimed to be a convenient language for scripts that build fast and run fast, for example.

OP: any chance to adjust that page? Then we'll announce to reddit.


Thanks,

Andrei

On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 20:36:46 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> OP: any chance to adjust that page? Then we'll announce to reddit.

I don't think it's ready.
If you want to promote a tutorial, I think that (at least for now) it should be the book of Ali Çehreli.

Also I thought that maybe it's worth to turn his book into an interactive tutorial.
The book have snippets of code (and exercises), and we have this script that executes D using dpaste. I think integrating both and adding some interactivity (and then maybe put it on tutorial.dlang.org or similar) could be a good combination.

On 10/07/2013 01:42 PM, Tourist wrote:

> the book of Ali Çehreli.
>
> Also I thought that maybe it's worth to turn his book into an
> interactive tutorial.

I thought about the same thing just the other day. :) I want to finish the translation first, which I really am doing.

To the OP: I will add a link to your tutorial after it gets a little more content.

Ali

A note on memory management: you can do your own reference counting with structs, and it works reasonably well.

On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 20:21:17 UTC, Brian Schott wrote:
> On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 19:18:40 UTC, qznc wrote:
>> Wreck it! :)
>
> The only thing that I don't like about it so far is that it's not on wiki.dlang.org. If you put it there it will be easier for learners to discover it, and for the rest of us to help writing it.

Editing in a wiki is so limiting. I want vim. I want git. I want scripts (e.g. testing all code examples with latest dmd). Building all this around a wiki is more work than necessary.