Re: Introduction and proposed contribution

[Jason White <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
 
> I've noticed in my learning of Emacspeak that, while there are plenty
> of reference materials, the number of up-to-date tutorial-style
> documents geared towards a raw newbie are somewhat sparse and spread
> out and are written in a way that someone coming from a strong Ms
> Windows background would find rather laborious to follow, increasing
> their learning curve unnecessarily.  This is probably because a lot of
> it was written by people who have used Linux for longer than Windows
> has been accessible (oh, what a battle that has been!) and, as is the
> case with many a developer, are more comfortable writing code than
> writing documents.  

Actually, T.V. Raman, the author of Emacspeak, is one of the most accomplished
technical writers that I have encountered - he is adept at writing prose as
well as code.

I would suggest reading his papers describing Emacspeak before you embark on
preparing a tutorial; this will give you a deeper understanding of the design
principles of the Emacspeak user interface.
> What I propose to do is to write a simple tutorial for newcomers to
> Emacspeak geared towards people who are new to command line, Linux and Emacs
> as well.  

A fundamental question that I would suggest considering is this: what do such
people really need to know before they can comfortably read Emacs
documentation, manual pages, HOWTO documents and other sources?

I have read claims in several places to the effect that it's harder for former
MS-Windows users to learn a UNIX-like environment than it is for absolute
beginners who have had no prior computing experience. Presumably, to the
extent that this is the case, it is because MS-Windows users have to set aside
their prior knowledge and habits in making the adjustment. I'm only
speculating here; the last Microsoft product that I ever used was DOS 6 and I
opted entirely out of Windows in favour of Linux at that time.

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