Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 15 May 2015 07:01:55 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com>
> 
> > I suspect that Rusi's agenda is to make the Emacs tutorial as easy to
> > understand as possible.
> > 
> > I've rarely managed to get one of my students to read the tutorial. I
> > would like to be able to change that situation. It's good to think of
> > how.
> 
> Thanks Phil
> 
> Only change I'd make to your representation of my 'agenda' is that
> I'd change 'easy' to 'useful'

Then why are you talking about cursor motion and its place in the
tutorial?  What does that tiny detail have to do with making the
tutorial easier/more useful?

Like I said: changes and even complete rewrites of the tutorial are
welcome.  But it has to be a more or less complete job, not just the
first few paragraphs.

(Minor changes to the tutorial are also welcome, but then we aren't
really talking about revolutionary new ideas, do we?)

> This in line with Stefan's understanding that different audiences would
> likely require different starting points.
> 
> eg For git there was a "Git for Computer Scientists"
> Presumably a CSist is one who would understand (and feel pleased with 
> understanding) graphs, dags etc
> Putting aside the naivete of that view the point is that some people may like to
> start looking at git 'as CSists' and others may not
> 
> Likewise emacs
> 
> "Emacs for typing tamil"
> (to pick up an adjacent thread) is likely to read differently from 
> "Emacs for C programmers"
> from 
> "Master GTD with emacs and org mode"
> from
> "Live online inside emacs! -- gnus, erc, sx"

These are tutorials for users who already mastered the basics.  IMO,
they belong to the respective manuals, the one for Org, Gnus, etc.,
but we could also maintain them as separate documents.

In any case, that is a far cry from the tutorial we were talking
about, which could only touch these advanced topics after covering a
lot of turf, without which you cannot even start to describe them.

But feel free to contradict me -- by actually writing such a tutorial.

TIA