[Bioperl-l] Re: thanks for the hardwork on HOWTO changeover

[Brian Osborne]

Jason,

My pleasure. You also wrote:

>We'd of course encourage other people to help write HOWTOs about particular
aspects of Bioperl or uses of Bioperl. 
>You don't need to be an ubercoder to write one. 

That¹s right. There¹s certainly more to be done on these HOWTOs. For
example, you could imagine an Align HOWTO, a bioperl-db HOWTO, or a
Structure HOWTO (though the code may be lagging here). I could also see
HOWTOs on Ontology, Graph, Biblio, and so on. You could also imagine ones I
can¹t imagine, I¹m sure. There are also missing sections in the Beginners,
Feature-Annotation, and Graphics HOWTOs, to name a few.

I¹d like to make a particular appeal to those of you who would like to
contribute but aren¹t sure how. The great thing about writing these sorts of
things is that you end up knowing quite a bit about the subject matter, so
choosing a topic that interests you but that you don¹t know well is a good
thing. You delve into the modules, you write and test code, you think of new
methods, it¹s a great way to learn Bioperl .

Brian O.

On 8/17/05 12:21 PM, "Jason Stajich" <jason.stajich at duke.edu> wrote:

> 
> I just want to publicly thank Brian Osborne for all the work to get the
> docbook and bioperl HOWTOs working more smoothly.  
> 
> Brian has spent a lot of time recently figuring out to get the XML -> HTML and
> XML->PDF really working correctly.  The point of writing things in docbook
> instead of latex, POD, plain text, or HTML is docbook is (intended) to provide
> fairly easy transformation of the document text into a number of different
> formats (RTF, plain text, HTML, PDF).  ( Once you get the tools working of
> course). 
> 
> The website should now have up-to-date versions of the documentation here:
> http://bioperl.org/HOWTOs and reflect the latest version of these documents
> that are in CVS.  
> 
> In the future the website HOWTOs will be kept up to date more closely with the
> versions in the CVS repository instead of the last official release.
> 
>          Brian has taken care of a lot of behind the scenes things in terms of
> project documentation and deserves a lot of credit for moving us forward in
> trying to make the toolkit more accessible to different levels of
> programmers.  So I'm sending out a big thank you!
> 
> Please give these HOWTOs a try, print them out, frame them on your walls,
> etc.  If you spot inconsistencies or weaknesses please try and help out by
> suggesting changes or adding text.
> 
> We'd of course encourage other people to help write HOWTOs about particular
> aspects of Bioperl or uses of Bioperl.  You don't need to be an ubercoder to
> write one.  If the XML format scares you, ask questions and have a look at the
> existing documents in doc/howto/xml.
> 
> 
>  
> 
> --
>  
> 
> Jason Stajich
>  
> 
> jason.stajich at duke.edu
>  
> 
> http://www.duke.edu/~jes12/
>  
>  
> 
>