Tutorial Planning and Quick Replies #
hacking, October 15th 2010
Many thanks for everyone who responded to my SBCL+Quicklisp Tutorial Topic survey. (I'm leaving the survey open for a while longer, so it's not too late to say your piece.)
The responses have been quite varied: some people believe that the last thing the world needs is another "Getting Started" or "Common Lisp + Web" tutorial — and others feel that those are the only ones that really matter. :)
Order of things remains to be seen, but I'm pretty sure I'll cover the ground mentioned in my original post in addition to other topics.
Some of the suggested topics which I have added to my list: how to structure a project, basic IO and external formats, regular expressions, FFI, threads, GUI stuff, OpenGL, ncurses, unit testing, S3, XML, music/sound, and application delivery.
Many more topics were suggested, but these were some of the more popular ones. Maintaining quality of the tutorials is important to me, so it remains to be seen if I will outsource some things, or if I will ask people better versed in a domain outside my experience to review what I have to say.
Many respondents took the opportunity to ask additional questions, so I'll answer a couple of them here:
- What platforms will you cover?
For the most part I will try to cover the big three: Linux, OS X, and Windows. Some tutorials might be platform specific, and some might be limited to eg. those platforms where SBCL thread support is up to snuff.
- Can I help?
Maybe! I've started writing, and will at some point ask for a few reviewers. Initially at least, however, I will do all of the writing. Once the style and quality of the tutorials is established I may take submissions — and as mentioned above, I may also end up soliciting them.
- No, really, how can I help right now?
Seriously? Ok...
Report SBCL bugs. Both in some responses to this survey, and in the SBCL User Survey people vaguely mentioned some SBCL bugs. It is not guaranteed that I or other devs know about them unless they are reported — and even if a bug is reported, it is important to know if it affects several people, or is a critical issue as opposed to an occasional annoyance.
Contribute to SBCL or other open source Common Lisp projects. There are countless ways. Try out QuickLisp and report any problems. Write documentation patches for existing libraries. Even if you're not a technical wizard, proofreding is always needed, and webpages can be prettified. Or if you or your company is using SBCL commercially, consider buying SBCL support.