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
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.
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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:
[This posting was updated and clarified on 8/6]
——————
[Novice] Previous Next
[Advanced] Previous
