A suggestion for perldoc

[Michele Dondi]

A lot of GUI programs feature a "tip of the day" box at startup, that
actually is mostly annoying, and in fact generally people disable it!

OTOH every now and again reading this ng or a doc/faq while looking
for something else I happen to discover some very cool feature I was
unaware of...

So I wonder if it may be worth to add a "tip of the day" feature to
perldoc, say by means of 'perldoc -T': of course there would be some
overlap with other pieces of documentation, but indeed I for one would
consider it useful!

Then two items that for sure I would include are the possibility of
putting a coderef into @INC (as of including Perl 5.6.1 and latter)
and that of open()ing a fh to "in memory" files held in a scalar.

To be definite, these tips should be very brief pieces of text
pointing to the full documentation.

For example, for the first item above I would say something like "Did
you know that you can put a coderef into @INC? For more info see
perlvar".

Any comments?!?


Michele

 

[Charlton Wilbur]

MD> So I wonder if it may be worth to add a "tip of the day"
MD> feature to perldoc, say by means of 'perldoc -T': of course
MD> there would be some overlap with other pieces of
MD> documentation, but indeed I for one would consider it useful!

There is a service that picks one of the Perl FAQ questions each day
and e-mails it to a mailing list. Perhaps you should subscribe.

Alternately, build the infrastructure yourself and ask people to
donate tips. I'm not sure how useful this would be for perldoc --
since the people who find this sort of thing useful are unlikely to
stumble upon it -- but there are hundreds of joke-, picture-, word-,
and tip-of-the-day mailing lists out there.

Charlton

 

[James Willmore]

MD> So I wonder if it may be worth to add a "tip of the day"
MD> feature to perldoc, say by means of 'perldoc -T': of course
MD> there would be some overlap with other pieces of
MD> documentation, but indeed I for one would consider it
MD> useful!

There is a service that picks one of the Perl FAQ questions each day
and e-mails it to a mailing list. Perhaps you should subscribe.

Alternately, build the infrastructure yourself and ask people to
donate tips. I'm not sure how useful this would be for perldoc --
since the people who find this sort of thing useful are unlikely to
stumble upon it -- but there are hundreds of joke-, picture-, word-,
and tip-of-the-day mailing lists out there.

Lest we forget how many times people have asked the all time favorite
question - that _is_ answered in the FAQ:
"Is there an IDE or Windows Perl Editor?"

If people don't take the time to _use_ perldoc, what good is this new
feature?

Just another 2 cents - take it for what it's worth

Jim
--
and now, a quote from fortune ....
================================================
Whistler's Law: You never know who is
right, but you always know who is in
charge.

================================================
and a real quote ....
Linus Torvalids: "They are somking crack ...."
(http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1227150,00.asp)

 

[Mike Flannigan]

There is a service that picks one of the Perl FAQ questions each day
and e-mails it to a mailing list. Perhaps you should subscribe.

Alternately, build the infrastructure yourself and ask people to
donate tips. I'm not sure how useful this would be for perldoc --
since the people who find this sort of thing useful are unlikely to
stumble upon it -- but there are hundreds of joke-, picture-, word-,
and tip-of-the-day mailing lists out there.

Charlton

I did a search for this, but could not find it. If anybody else
finds it, please post for all to see.

I did find this comment:


To the fine person behind the mailing of these Perl FAQ questions in
comp.lang.perl.misc:

I love you!! I look forward to these each day and
they've stopped my learnin-self
from asking a repetitive question MANY a time in this
Newsgroup!

Bravo! Bravo!!!! They're short - PERFECT for us
newbies, and concise!

Eric

 

[Matt Garrish]

I did a search for this, but could not find it. If anybody else
finds it, please post for all to see.

I can't say that I know of the service that he was speaking about, but there
was a time when FAQ entries were posted to clpm. They were being posted up
to a year ago, but in the intervening time it seems a change was made to
posting posting guidlines. I believe you can get tips emailed to you at
learn.perl.org, but I don't know if they're the faqs or something else.

Matt

 

[Scott Yanoff]

http://perl.faq-by-day.org/

I was able to find a Perl Tip of the Day list at:
http://www.perlcoders.com/main/tipoftheday.html

Cheers,

 

[Michele Dondi]

MD> So I wonder if it may be worth to add a "tip of the day"
MD> feature to perldoc, say by means of 'perldoc -T': of course
MD> there would be some overlap with other pieces of
MD> documentation, but indeed I for one would consider it useful!

There is a service that picks one of the Perl FAQ questions each day
and e-mails it to a mailing list. Perhaps you should subscribe.

I know! FAQ entries used to be posted regularly here too, as someone
else mentioned. However, as I said, my (vague) idea was of something
somehow different from a (the) FAQ.

I think that the tip-of-the-day feature, would one exist, should focus
on advanced, hardly known, cool (not or not necessarily misunderstood,
as is more common in a FAQ) features possibly introduced in recent
versions of the language.

Alternately, build the infrastructure yourself and ask people to
donate tips. I'm not sure how useful this would be for perldoc --
since the people who find this sort of thing useful are unlikely to
stumble upon it -- but there are hundreds of joke-, picture-, word-,
and tip-of-the-day mailing lists out there.

I mostly agree. However I was thinking that while you generally have
to perform a well determined task and you learn while working on it,
OTOH sometimes you happen to wonder what other cool trick is hidden in
Perl that you still don't know and maybe you have some spare time, so
this might be an occasion for a perldoc based tip of the day.

Of course it wouldn't be of MUCH use. Yet, IMHO, it would be of SOME
use...


Thanks,
Michele

 

[Anno Siegel]

I know! FAQ entries used to be posted regularly here too, as someone
else mentioned. However, as I said, my (vague) idea was of something
somehow different from a (the) FAQ.

I think that the tip-of-the-day feature, would one exist, should focus
on advanced, hardly known, cool (not or not necessarily misunderstood,
as is more common in a FAQ) features possibly introduced in recent
versions of the language.

The hard part, it seems to me, is generating an initial mass of such
tips. If it's going to be run in a fortune-cookie manner, you need a
hundred, better more. They would have to be short, too. I can't think
of too many of those, but then I'm just one. I think the 03 thing to
do is set up a wiki.

Anno

 

[Iain Truskett]

* Michele Dondi <[email protected]>:

[...]

OTOH every now and again reading this ng or a doc/faq
while looking for something else I happen to discover some
very cool feature I was unaware of...

Perhaps purchase "Perl Cookbook" (2nd edition is freshly
released). It contains many useful tips, all in bite sized
morsels.


cheers,

 

[Michele Dondi]

The hard part, it seems to me, is generating an initial mass of such
tips. If it's going to be run in a fortune-cookie manner, you need a
hundred, better more. They would have to be short, too. I can't think

Well, I suggested 2 that came to mind soon...

of too many of those, but then I'm just one. I think the 03 thing to
do is set up a wiki.

Some friends of mine working on a cluster at our University's
department (mostly on a volounteering basis!) were thinking of a
possible service of general/public utility for the lab.

I *think* that setting up a wiki for this task would be OK, but I'm a
bit concerned about the visibility it might have amongst all those
/.*perl.*/ domains out there...


Michele