Should I write a book?

General
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However you did purchase those books so the author did get some recompense for his/her work.

Which is really great, so where do I find your videos in Spanish, German, Te Reo? The upside of the written word is Google Translate. If there is an audio translation service for technical videos I haven’t seen it (may have missed it though, only speak English myself).

I only have < 1hr of Xojo movies and they are focused on Windows testing/implementation (watch @Bob Keeney’s mine are boring). But I do wonder how @Bernardo Monsalve or @Alexis Colon Lugo cope with my English? I also wonder what I’m missing out from the non-english forums with their multimedia offering? Does @Christian Schmidt have a whole bunch of movies I can’t understand?

@Markus Winter I would be more than happy to provide you with my little sector of expertise in the Xojo space. I say do it!

22

If someone writes a book, let me know and I buy a few copies to raffle them off at the next conference!

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[quote=351135:@Wayne Golding]Which is really great, so where do I find your videos in Spanish, German, Te Reo? The upside of the written word is Google Translate. If there is an audio translation service for technical videos I haven’t seen it (may have missed it though, only speak English myself).
[/quote]
When we’ve questioned subscribers, most say English closed captions are good enough. We’ve not done that yet, but we have the transcriptions for nearly all of our videos. Now to find the time to put them into time code format. Sadly, I’ve not found any way to automate that process. It really is a matter of finding time to implement these features.

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there is never enough time in the day….

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I love well written technical books. Reading books has been my main method of learning. I used to love taking them to bed. Well, you know, to read before I went to sleep :). It’s amazing how much info I retained and put in the back of my mind for later use.

Unfortunately, with the pace of software updates, ie. every 3 months or so (not just Xojo) then I think writing an overall book is redundant. However, writing small well thought through extracts of particular features may well be worthwhile.

I’m not a great fan of video tutorials or even online documentation. One reason being, is that it’s too easy to not have to remember things. Sort of like my SatNav, where I’m so used to it, I’d struggle to get over to the other side of town without it.

I do like my SatNav, but I certainly wouldn’t take it to bed with me.

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So your suggestion is writing mini-books? I am just trying to understand your statement/advice.

Thanks!

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[quote=351328:@scott boss]So your suggestion is writing mini-books? I am just trying to understand your statement/advice.

Thanks![/quote]

Yes Scott, mini books is what I mean. This is not a new idea as Eugene Dakin on this forum has written a few successful one’s himself (I have the Canvas one). I’m sure there is still scope for a few other titles by other authors:

*File I/O Operations
*Databases
*Methods, Classes, Modules
*Sound & Video
etc…

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How to add cc to videos…

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If you consider Eugene’s books mini books then I shudder to think what you consider a real book …

30

Markus, this thread stopped in Sep 2017 without any conclusion. What happened? Did you decide to write a book or wiki or something on Xojo?

31

Most programmers are happy enough to have the stuff in English. If you are a native English speaker, you don’t realize who difficult it is to be a programmer if you don’t at least have a good competence in reading English. Just simple things like access to information - English texts are usually available long before local editions and some stuff never gets translated because there just is not the demand.

My son is doing a Computer Science degree at the University of Bern, officially it is presented in German, but if you don’t speak English you have no chance of getting the degree. A lot of the study material is in English and even the instructions for some of the assignments are in English.

If you follow the idea that people are good at languages or science, then we must have a lot of very exceptional people in IT, since many people work daily in a language other than their native one.

32

If you are autodidact, you are in troubles and need Tutorials and far better documentation.

On the other hand, if you have followed a Computer Science degree, all you need is the syntax (sometimes).

Did you know about the xDev Magazine ? This is a source of information. Search for xDev in this forum for more details.

Now, when I read some late entries in this forum, many are asked by people who never programmed in their lives (in need for tutorials).
Also, I have some questions about… Do they read the documentation or/and search in the internet before asking question(s) ? (did they do their home work before asking ?)
I do not say that this is bad, only asking simple things without prior search never help people. The reverse is far more useful (for the questioneer, of course).

Is the Xojo documentation good ? It can be improved.

With time, I learned that I’d better search at sqlite.org (and http://www.w3schools.com/) when I want to program with SQLite Data Base with Xojo (and some other technologies).

Yes, I buy a book on SQL (the one suggested by Xojo: “SQL for Dummies”), it was new, as new as it was out of the printers, but was old and lacked instructions, display a Terminal style code examples, etc. I learned far more from the provided documentation than from that book, but when it comes to the hard part (thing not covered by the docs nor the book), I asked here and get answers, most of the time excellent ones.

Did you compare Xojo to other development environments ? Are they better ?

FWIW: I do not own a Computer Science degree and I work with computers since 1980.