[Bioperl-l] FAQ and newbie guide

[Jason Stajich]

AS part of the 0.7.1 release and gearing towards a very stable 1.0
release, I'd like to see us doing a better job making the code accessible
to newcomers.  A certain level of perl knowledge is going to be expected,
but we've had quite a few requests for simple instructions on how to do
some basic tasks.  

One thing that Ensembl did (and I liked) was have a FAQ on its wiki pages.
People could pose questions/scenarios and then Ensebl developers would
post the code snippets or descriptions of how to solve the scenarios.

I think the tutorial is a great resource but few people want to
take the time to read the whole thing.  If we could write a FAQ
with scenarios and then link to code snippets from the tutorial
or elsewhere that address the questions of the user I think we'd make
great strides in helping newbies. 

A basic "GettingStarted" Wiki on where to go for help would also be great.

All you volunteers to help with documentation, I think this would be an
excellent jumping in point.  Wiki is probably the best place, but I don't
know that it will be robust enough to post proper code snippets, but
certainly to provide text and links.  Perhaps we'll want to start a public
html dir on bio.perl.org where perl scripts can be placed and linked from
wiki.

-Jason

Jason Stajich
jason@chg.mc.duke.edu
Center for Human Genetics
Duke University Medical Center 
http://www.chg.duke.edu/