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Re: Re: Version 6 "Mathematica Book" - updated

Thomas,

My feeling is that the tutorials in your chapter Further Tutorials are 
just waiting to be adapted to the overall stucture of documentation 
tutorials or to be removed. Your three main chapters are based on 
overview notebook files that have links to  other tutorials, all of them 
having a TOCTitle cell and lower level links in TOCSection, 
TOCSubsection, TOCSubsubsections cells. All these tutorials are found in 
the three main chapters of your virtual book.

The further tutorials have a different structure. First, there is no 
overview notebook containing a link to them. Then the relevant cells do 
not have a TOC-structure. When there is a title cell at all, the type is 
just Title. Moreover, when opened, some of them show the heading 
obsolete tutorial.

As far as I know, WRI is working very hard on the documentation an I 
expect that already in the next release we will have more overview 
notebooks on more topics (stylesheets!) than we have now. That will have 
an impact on your very useful virtual Mathematica book. But if that 
release will have THE Mathematica book again is another question. 
Personally, I feel no need for it and, like you, I am very happy with 
the new documentation center.

Fred Simons
Eindhoven University of Technology

thomas wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>
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