jojo wrote:
I suppose thanks for expanding the wiki, though. That's never a bad thing.
The idea is to build documentation that is absolutely implementable and noise-free in a single place. It needs to be so good that the source code, its comments, the videos that show how to compile and run (and what effect the program has), and any other documentation be enough to teach a new trick to a programmer to provide a clear starting point, and make it useful in real applications.
It shouldn't even take a week to learn one of those tricks, but around a day instead, or it wouldn't really explain what is being needed to make evident of the logic of the program.A lot can be improved if it's done in all other topics, aspects and algorithms. In some years, the Wiki and other documents and projects' source code would look better with the additional intricate documentation around about them.
But we need a ton of runnable and high-quality examples that teach specific things that aren't really common when you start learning at least. If you remember the times of Turbo C++ 1, you would remember that the examples it contained were very good. But after Win9x and even more after Windows XP, this sort of clear tutorials that start from the most trivial seem almost limited only to those of that time, for classic hardware and software (which contain algorithms that are still as valuable as at that time anyway).
As you can see this topic indicates the very start in the most simple and brief way, to control the parallel port under Windows, which was no longer so obvious.
As you can see, you wouldn't find it directly in the links you put, but you would need to study them and write a similar code snippet from scratch. But now with this, it can just be reused since you know exactly where to start and exactly how.
Those documents might be good, but the noise needs to be taken out and each one of the things it teaches converted into running examples, to make it useful for a beginner.Programmer's Heaven was an exceptional resource and it still is. The problem is that all of their files and documents were moved to a download directory and the main page now has a Questions/Answers format.
The old interface had more value than this, and the Questions/Answers would have been better in a subdomain.
The point is that those documents cause a lot of enthusiasm in newbies, but when I have seen them in the past and surely many others, the enthusiasm remains but I have been left unimpressed by seeing that they don't contain everything in such practical detail so that I can implement it immediately in real-world drivers.
When a competent newbie is unimpressed by the available documentation, that's a bad sign that tells that the documentation available is halfway from teaching what is really needed to implement useful things at the end of the reading.But as you can see, with this topic now you can go ahead and control every output pin individually.
Later we would get to add more information and programs showing how to control the different port modes, explaining what is their original usage. But right now, since at least I don't have that information clear, I just don't include it because I don't have any way to teach it usefully, so by now it would just be padding.
When I get more information that is usable in real contexts (like driving specific models of parallel printers or scanners), then I will be able to explain it and make it worth to read it.