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Hello all,
As my name has been mentioned a few times in this thread, I thought
I'd weigh in. Here are my thoughts.
First, as was posted previously, I think the developer community should
take it upon ourselves to do voluntarily what we can to promote the
BlackBox platform. This is difficult because our numbers are small.
There
does not appear to be a critical mass of developers to easily spread the
effort so that no one individual is burdened. I have no easy solution to
this problem, but I do believe that whatever the solution is, we should
not
look to Oberon microsystems for more help than they currently provide.
They are a small company, and to expect more resources from them
is unrealistic. See below for one suggestion.
Second, I would like to inform you of some things I am doing with
BlackBox. The "BlackBox Tutorial" that was posted for some years is
now available in book form. I continue to use the framework in my
introductory course at Pepperdine University and developed the
material for my course. It is titled "Computing Fundamentals" and is
available in Europe at www.amazon.de. Do a search of all books
on "Computing Fundamentals" (even though it is written in English).
It should shortly be available in the U.S. through Springer New
York, after which I hope it appears on amazon.com.
For those who are interested in using BlackBox to teach introductory
computer science, I have just completed a series of presentations
and source code animations that I use in my lectures. The material
is now at
ftp://ftp.pepperdine.edu/pub/compsci/comp-fund/
The "chapters" directory has the first three chapters of the book.
The "figures" directory has the presentations/animations.
They are in pdf form and are designed to be displayed at 200%
with the Adobe reader. The source code animations are particularly
effective for illustrating recursion and linked structures. You might
be able to use this material for training or tutorial purposes if you
ever need to make a presentation on BlackBox or Component
Pascal.
The paper about using BlackBox in education that was mentioned
in a previous post is at the same site.
Third, I have started a new effort to develop a more extensive
tutorial on View Programming. The purpose is to supplement
Chapter 6, View Construction in the BB online documentation, which,
as several have commented in this thread, could use some improvement.
As this is a "spare time" voluntary project, I cannot promise anything,
but I should have some preliminary material within a month. I'll inform
the list when I have something to show.
Fourth, it seems to me that what is missing in the community is
a voluntary BlackBox Users Group (BBUG) that is independent
from the company and that maintains its own web site to which
people can contribute and use as a resource. I would be willing
to host the site on a computer in our lab, but would have no time
to maintain it. We could have a "How do I ..." FAQ as some
have already suggested. The site could also be a central repository
for contributed BB source code. I think this kind of effort needs one
individual to be responsible for the maintenance of the site.
The amount of time required would depend on the content and
form of the site. Chime in to this discussion if you are interested.
Regards,
Stan
J. Stanley Warford
Professor of Computer Science
Pepperdine University
Malibu, CA 90263
310-506-4332
Stan.Warford{([at]})nowhere.xy
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Received on Sun Aug 03 2003 - 20:11:53 UTC