Turing Project: Two Levels

Turing Entry: [Novice: 2]  [Advanced: 2]    FAQ     Table of Contents    

 

In a previous post I described Project Turing. This is the second entry for that project and will describe how I hope to meet the needs of two audiences: 

Novice: programmers who may or may not have experience with other languages, may not know C# (or advanced C#), .NET or the fundamentals of Silverlight (e.g., what Xaml is)

Advanced: programmers who have worked with Silverlight and want to go beyond the basiscs; who want to see a design-to-delivery walk through that touches on more advanced topics.

You Can’t Get There From Here

In traditional publishing, I couldn’t possibly address both audiences in the same documentation. Either I would lose the novice by assuming to much, or I would make the advanced  programmer crazy by explaining too much.

But the web is different. I believe that I can document the entire process of design-through-delivery of Project Turing for both audiences independently, but in a single set of posts

(I don’t think anyone has tried this, but I do think it can be done and if done well, would be valuable. In any case, it will be fun to try.)

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

I was in a very large hospital not long ago. At the information desk you could look up and see 8 colored tubes. You told the desk person where you wanted to go and they handed you a piece of paper with one of the 8 colors.   Just follow your color.  As you walked along, the different colors would branch off… sometimes they’d rejoin for a while. If you kept an eye on your color, the tubes took you where you wanted to go.

This project will be documented with two tubes, er, threads: Novice and advanced. You just follow your thread

iStock_ 3 elevators Large

Every entry will have a pointer to the next and previous entry for both threads. If you follow a single thread it should read like a continuous story,but of course you are free to switch back and forth as your interest dictates.

 

Not Sidebars, Not Asides; A threaded Whole

What you end up reading should not be a set of side-notes, but rather a coherent set of posts and tutorials, targeted at your level of experience.

Let me be very clear about my objective as it is unusual:  If you choose to follow the Novice path , you should experience that you are reading a Novice-targeted  set of posts, not an advanced set of posts with asides for beginners.

Headers, Footers and “Page numbers”

Beginning with this post, and for the rest of this project, each blog posting on Project Turing will bear a header much like this:

 Turing Entry: [Novice: 7]  [Advanced: 3]    FAQ     Table of Contents    

You read the header shown as follows: “This is the 7th entry for the Novice thread and the 3rd entry for the Advanced thread.  

[What you are reading right now, however, is the second post for both]

At the bottom of each page you’ll find a footer like this:

[Novice]       Previous    Next
[Advanced]  Previous    Next

by following the Next for your thread you should find that the entries are numbered consecutively. Thus you can think of the series as looking like this:

 

TuringPageNumbers

 

[This posting was updated and clarified on 8/6]

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[Novice]       Previous    Next
[Advanced]  Previous   

 

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. His latest book, Building APIs with .NET will be released early in 2025. Liberty is a Senior SW Engineer for CNH and he was a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Microsoft MVP.
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