Talk:Software Engineers Handbook

What is your quest?
A friend asked me what was the purpose of this wikibook, and how it was different from other wikibooks and references out there. I thought the answer was worth general discussion.

I see a whole lot of sites out there that try to answer the "what" about some software part. (Wikipedia is a really good example.) I would like the handbook to answer the "how" questions. A lot of times this will be a "How do I start?" or "How do I get started in XXXXX?" type question. Many times the answer will be Check out these references. or Here's the vocabulary you need to look on the web.

I have a different push with the language dictionary section. I would like to be able to find the concepts that I find hard to find in beginners' books. They're spending so much time teaching the basics of programming, that the basics of the language get hidden. I thought It would be really sweet to compare a language you know with one you're trying to learn in the same format. The second time you use the dictionary it would be even easier. --Christine Frayda 01:48, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Computer Programming
Do you mean something along the line of:

--Krischik T 10:37, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

That's not what I intended, but I'd love to hear from others. I was hoping to have roughly single page descriptions of each language, so that it is easy to compare between languages without being bogged down with too many details. I don't know that there would be much help in pointing to the sub-sections. Is the language dictionary section too redundant with the computer programming wikibook?

--Christine Frayda 00:23, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Red links in the language section
I am in favor of removing the red links from the language sections. It is a bad habit of many language advocates to add there language anywhere they see fit without providing an article to go with it. We should not tolerate such laziness and remove those vanity entries.

--Krischik T 10:37, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Krischik! I'll remove some red links that don't seem to add clarification to the category. I think some of them help, but definitely not all.

Christine Frayda 00:17, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Book is Redundant
Alot of topics in this book are heavily redundant. The only part of this book that couldn't (and probably shouldn't) be merged into other books would be the "software life-cycle" part. All the rest of this book, from paradigms to the "language dictionary" is already represented in the form of other books currently on the CS bookshelf. Also, this book certainly doesn't follow any naming convention that I am familiar with.

I think it is a waste of time and resources to try and make a single monolithic book that covers the same material as is already to be found on the CS bookshelf. I won't list this book for VfD or anything, but i think it would be better for everybody to contribute to the books that already exist on these topics, then to try and find new ways to say the things that have already been said. --Whiteknight (talk) (current) 19:34, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into this Whiteknight. My idea wasn't to cover the material in detail, but to start people in the right direction. It may be that the computer science bookshelf does this already. When I last looked at it, the bookshelf was not beginner friendly, but this handbook may not be much more. Do you know of a place that compares languages well in a quick (1-page-ish) side-by-side reference format?

All that being said, I don't rule out that much of this work could be redundant. How can we best merge any missing bits back to the parent documents? Christine Frayda 01:41, 16 April 2006 (UTC)


 * If your goal here is to have a quick comparison guide and a series of reference tables, then I supposed I don't have much quarrel with that. That kind of information is not well tabulated here at wikibooks. --Whiteknight (talk) (current) 13:12, 17 April 2006 (UTC)