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Re: Print[Plot] vs Print[text,Plot]?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg88152] Re: Print[Plot] vs Print[text,Plot]?
• From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
• Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:45:17 -0400 (EDT)

On 4/25/08 at 5:27 AM, siegman at stanford.edu (AES) wrote:

>In article <fupm41$s4n$1 at smc.vnet.net>, Helen Read
><hpr at together.net> wrote:

>>There are a *lot* of extremely useful things "New in 6.0" that are
>>very much worth the effort to learn.


>Yes, I totally agree.

>So, could you please point me to the well-organized, well-written,
>well-illustrated introduction to (repeat: "Introduction to", not
>"Detailed Reference Documentation for") the most important and
>useful of these new things (and the ones most changed since 5.n),

<snip>

>What?  You want me to go to the Mathematica Documentation Center?

When I select Documentation Center from the Help menu, I get a
page showing seven boxes with bold face headings. At the bottom
of each is an item that says new in 6. When I click on any of
those, I get a page that lists a bunch of related things that
are in 6 but not 5 and a few things that were in 5 but have been
modified in 6. This allowed me to quickly identify areas of
interest to me that had either changed or were new. And when I
clicked on any of the functions, up comes a very nice
description of the function and examples of its use. Much better
than previous online documentation. Why doesn't this serve as a
fairly effective introduction to what is new in 6 for you?

I am well aware the documentation center does not fully replace
a book. The advantage of a book is that you can easily flip
through the pages and browse things of interest. There is
nothing in the documentation center that works as well as a book
for this purpose. Even the new virtual book in version 6.02
(while a very nice improvement) doesn't really replace a book.

However, for rapidly finding out how a new function works, the
documentation center is far better than a book. This is
particularly true since those pages are interactive. I can
change parameters to the function and see the effect. That is a
great way to learn how a function works and cannot be done with
a book.