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
--
# This prints: Just another Perl hacker,
seek DATA,15,0 and print q... <DATA>;
__END__

[Charlton Wilbur]

>>>>> "MD" == Michele Dondi <bik.mido@tiscalinet.it> writes:

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




--
cwilbur at chromatico dot net
cwilbur at mac dot com

[James Willmore]

On Sun, 31 Aug 2003 18:00:03 GMT
Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@mithril.chromatico.net> wrote:

> >>>>> "MD" == Michele Dondi <bik.mido@tiscalinet.it> writes:

>
> 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 ...."
([url]http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1227150,00.asp[/url])

[Mike Flannigan]

Charlton Wilbur wrote:

> 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]

"Mike Flannigan" <mikeflan@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:3F525C8F.CF4D6C21@earthlink.net...

>
> Charlton Wilbur wrote:
>

> > 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 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]

Charlton Wilbur wrote:

> [url]http://perl.faq-by-day.org/[/url]

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

Cheers,

--
-Scott
[email]yanoff@STOP-SPAMMINGyahoo.com[/email] | [url]http://www.yanoff.org[/url] | AOL IM: SAY KJY

[Michele Dondi]

On Sun, 31 Aug 2003 18:00:03 GMT, Charlton Wilbur
<cwilbur@mithril.chromatico.net> wrote:

>>>>>> "MD" == Michele Dondi <bik.mido@tiscalinet.it> writes:

>
> 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
--
# This prints: Just another Perl hacker,
seek DATA,15,0 and print q... <DATA>;
__END__

[Anno Siegel]

Michele Dondi <bik.mido@tiscalinet.it> wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:

> On Sun, 31 Aug 2003 18:00:03 GMT, Charlton Wilbur
> <cwilbur@mithril.chromatico.net> wrote:
>

> >>>>>> "MD" == Michele Dondi <bik.mido@tiscalinet.it> writes:

> >
> > 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.

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 <bik.mido@tiscalinet.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...

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


cheers,
--
Iain.

[Michele Dondi]

On 3 Sep 2003 21:00:32 GMT, [email]anno4000@lublin.zrz.tu-berlin.de[/email] (Anno
Siegel) wrote:

>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
--
# This prints: Just another Perl hacker,
seek DATA,15,0 and print q... <DATA>;
__END__