On Aug 8, 2010, at 2:45 AM, Torsten Zühlsdorff wrote:
Scott Frankel schrieb:
On Aug 6, 2010, at 6:13 AM, Torsten Zühlsdorff wrote:
John Gage schrieb:
On reflection, I think what is needed is a handbook that features
cut and paste code to do the things with Postgres that people do
today with MySQL.
Everyone of my trainees want such thing - for databases, for other
programming-languages etc. It's the worst thing you can give them.
The< will copy, they will paste and they will understand nothing.
Learning is the way to understanding, not copying.
I couldn't disagree more. Presenting working code (at least
snippets) should continue to be a fundamental part of any
documentation project.
You missunderstand me. Working code is a fundamental part of any
documentation. But we talk about a handbook with code that works in
PostgreSQL and does the same thinks in MySQL.
This way the trainees won't learn how PostgreSQL works, the just
learn the different examples. Giving them training-problems and the
PostgreSQL handbook is out of my experience the best way. It tooks
longer for them to solve the problems, but in this way they are able
to solve problems, which are not related to the presented examples.
I understand and appreciate your position. Thanks for the
clarification.
While I believe that this thread has, for all intents and purposes,
run its course (and I look forward to reading the documentation it
informs), I'm going to go out on a limb and present an additional use-
case that may be unpopular, or at least controversial.
There are times when a documentation's audience is not interested in
taking the subject matter to expert level. (eg: informed supervisory
or vendor-client relationships, proof of concept development, hobbies,
&c.). For those cases, "a working understanding" is all that's
strictly necessary. Annotated, cookbook-style code reference is
especially well suited for that mode of learning.
Regards,
Scott
Greetings from Germany,
Torsten
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