[Bioperl-l] Newbie question regarding the BioPerl Archive

[Ewan Birney]

On 21 Dec 2001, Elizabeth Bowen wrote:

> It sounds like the developers already have their hands full for a
> while.  (Understatement?!?) But when things settle down a little, can
> I hedge a newbie suggestion?  (This may be something that could help
> out all of the potential newbie BioPerl people from the O'Reilly
> conference as well.)
> 

We've got alot of time here for Newbies, and in particular I am aware that
bioperl is not really newbie friendly - most of the developers in Bioperl
use it for reasonably large scale genome/bioinformatics processing and our
bias is for clean objects that we can extend easily - not for easy to
learn objects.


Nat (from Oreilly - I am not going to attempt to spell his last name as I
know I will get it wrong!) suggested a "newbie friendly" Bio::Perl module
that would give easier to learn access to the main objects --- do you
think that would be a help?


(PS - have you tried Peter Schattner's tutorial? Did you like it? Can be
improved? If so --- how?)



In any case, don't fear about speaking up if you don't get something --
we'll only get annoyed if you don't listen ;).


> I was delighted to find out that there was a Bioperl archive page:  
> http://bio.perl.org/pipermail/bioperl-l/
> 
> Is there some way to search for a topic in the archive without having
> to download it in its entirety or read through subjects for each month
> of the archive?  I don't have enough space to download it and it is a
> chore to go through each month searching for a needle in a haystack.
> 
> Also, is there an FAQ page for Bioperl?
> 

No-one has really had the energy to maintain one (we could maintain one
through the Wiki right guys? Or we had a FAQ-o-Matic?). Elizabeth - if you
would want to compile your top ten questions to start (or restart) a FAQ
and then looked after it, then that would be great...


> Sorry to add more to your plate.  I just would just like to be able to
> solve a lot of my problems due to inexperience with Bioperl without
> taking up anyone's time on the list.  I'll bet a lot of other newbies
> feel somewhat self-conscious about that too.
> 

I don't we mind - it usually takes us seconds to respond and saves you
alot of pain - post away!



ewan