Re: I wanna contribute to LDP

[Dan Scott <dan.scott@acm.org>]

On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Andrew P Moise wrote:

>   So I'm stunned as always at how helpful a particular HOWTO has been to
> me, and I'd like the opportunity to give something back.  Two things I
> think I'd be reasonably competent to do are:
>   An Algorithms-HOWTO, a quick sketch of hash tables, sorting, red-black
> trees, heaps, and the like, for people who have no formal training in
> computer science but want to move from shell scripts to real programming
> (including links to proper-length documentation on the stuff).

To be completely selfish, I would love to see an Algorithm-HOWTO (I've
been moving from shell scripts to real programming for years, but never
quite seem to get there). I wouldn't be surprised if you identified a
sizable audience with this one.

>   man pages on file formats; sox and gd nonwithstanding, there's been
> many a time when I just wanted to know what the header fields in an .au
> file were and had to spend a couple minutes on the web/in the source to
> find it out, and a man page with structs included would have made my
> life more convenient.  Even the non-trivial formats like PNG or (ha!)
> MPEG could be explained in terms of record structure, with links to
> detailed explanations of the compression.  I can't pledge the lifetime
> of work it would take to document them all, but I think I could make a
> not-quite-miniscule dent.

This also sounds like a worthwhile project, given that (in some
cases) file formats are far more stable than the programs that make use of
them.

Me being me, if I had to choose between your two proposed HOWTOs I would
probably want the Algorithm-HOWTO. But I look forward to whichever one (or
both!) you decide to work on.

Dan

-- 
Dan Scott,
Friend of the abnormal.


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