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Re: Version 6 "Mathematica Book" - updated

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg80173] Re: Version 6 "Mathematica Book" - updated
• From: thomas <thomas.muench at gmail.com>
• Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:02:54 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <200708090918.FAA21022@smc.vnet.net>

On Aug 13, 10:41 am, Murray Eisenberg <mur... at math.umass.edu> wrote:

> NAMING:
>
> * thomas' code includes the unnecessary "New: " at the start of certain
> section titles.  OK, I can live with that.

The main reason I included the "New: " was that I myself decided where
to put these chapters within "The Book", since these were not present
in the v5.2 book. I wanted to give people an easy way to spot these
chapters and move them to different places if it seems more
appropriate that way. So far, nobody complained, so my choice wasn't
that bad, it seems.

This brings up another issue, however, which is the section I named
"Further Tutorials" between "The Book" and the section with the
"Package" documentation. Obviously, these tutorials fit somewhere
within the natural flow of "The Book", but I didn't feel like going to
the trouble to figure out where. Instead, I at least tried to divide
them into topics. Some of these tutorials are quite basic, while some
of them are very sophisticated indeed (like the ones about dynamic
interactivity, or the one about Random Number Generation).

In fact, I feel it should not be anybody's job to figure out the
outline of where to place these tutorials, that should be done by the
folks at WRI. Obviously somebody wrote those documents, it should not
be too hard for the authors to place them appropriately within "The
Book".

So, maybe the next version of Mathematica Documentation Center will
have "The Book" again, with proper placement of all tutorials. I have
to say, I really do like the new documentation center with its many
examples, it is just a shame that it hides these tutorials, which are
really excellent documents, and obfuscates the natural order in which
they were written and supposed to be read in (i.e. the order of "The
Book").

Thomas

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Re: Version 6 "Mathematica Book" - updated
    • From: Fred Simons <f.h.simons@tue.nl>
  • Re: Re: Version 6 "Mathematica Book" - updated
    • From: Murray Eisenberg <murray@math.umass.edu>

• References:
  • Version 6 "Mathematica Book" - updated and expanded
    • From: thomas <thomas.muench@gmail.com>