On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Scott Frankel <frankel@circlesfx.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 6, 2010, at 6:13 AM, Torsten Zühlsdorff wrote:
>
>> John Gage schrieb:
>>
>>> On reflection, I think what is needed is a handbook that features cut and
>>> paste code to do the things with Postgres that people do today with MySQL.
>>
>> Everyone of my trainees want such thing - for databases, for other
>> programming-languages etc. It's the worst thing you can give them. The< will
>> copy, they will paste and they will understand nothing. Learning is the way
>> to understanding, not copying.
>
> I couldn't disagree more. Presenting working code (at least snippets)
> should continue to be a fundamental part of any documentation project.
I agree. It's especially useful if you're dealing with folks who
already have a clue, but may not be 100% familiar with how SQL or a
particular language. I had a Perl cookbook back in the day that was
priceless when I was switching from C to Perl. I didn't just copy and
paste, but I did certainly learn a lot looking at other people's code.
The idea being discussed here is a CookBook and it's extremely useful.
The current manual has a lot of examples, and some of them are very
much cookbook style. I'm sure we could always use more.