Steve Holden wrote: > BartlebyScrivener wrote: >> Now you are on a page with promising-looking links that all start with >> "BeginnersGuide," but the first three are not warm welcomes, they are >> housekeeping matters about where you can take courses or how to >> download Python for people who don't know whether they want to or not >> yet, or there's one that says "examples" which will take you to the >> ActiveState Cookbook site so you can get really confused.
<snip many more valid criticisms> > I think the Python community as a whole should take this on board as > fair criticism. It would be really nice if a total beginner did actually > see a usable path through the web to their first working Python program. OK I'll bite. That Beginners Guide page has bugged me for a long time. It's a wiki page but it is marked as immutable so I can't change it. Here are some immediate suggestions: - get rid of the 1-7 list at the top it is very confusing and does not present information in a useful form or order. All of these links except the help link appear in the body text in more useful form. - Change the sentence "Read BeginnersGuide/Overview to learn the key points." to "Read BeginnersGuide/Overview to learn what makes Python special." Or maybe get rid of it completely - I'm not sure evangelism belongs on this page. - Add a sentence at the end of the paragraph that starts, "Once you've read a tutorial" that says, "Many other resources are listed in BeginnersGuide/Help." On the BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers page, I agree, Guido's tutorial probably shouldn't be listed first even with the disclaimer. It goes way to fast for a beginner. Alan Gauld's tutorial is very popular on the tutor list, so is A Byte of Python (which is not listed on the NonProgrammers page). I would list them first. Or maybe take a vote on the tutor list for favorite beginner's tutorial. That should help a little, maybe we won't confuse the newbies before they even get to an interpreter prompt. Kent PS I am aware of the usual SF bug report procedure for docs, does it apply to these pages? I don't know, they don't have the usual "About this document" link at the bottom. I'm happy to submit a patch if that will help. Otherwise I'm not sure what "the Python community as a whole [taking] this on board" should look like. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
