World: r3wp

I'm looking for a LEARNING MAP that could be used as a fast track 
to learning to build interesting little applications.

There are so many options (modifiers) to Rebol instructions that 
it isn't immediatly clear what core essentials should be learned 
first, or what general structure of Rebol syntax should be learned 
to become effective rapidly.

Yeah, that is kinda in the progess of being built.  There are some 
awesome resources
but they need to be tracked down sometimes....

The cookbook  http://rebol.net/cookbookbeing one starting point.

rebol.org  has a lot of scripts, but it requires reading code a lot 
of the time....
The REBOL Viewtop  (desktop command at console)
    REBOL Folder ->Tools->Word Browser is not bad for options

I'm sure, as the pros keep saying, that once you have learned Rebol, 
it is very fast to code applications. The problem is that it might 
be that to get to that point takes quite a while

I can read the code. The thing is I have yet to get to a point where 
I can sit down and start thinking code to do things.

REBOL/Core and /View has builtin  help  as well...but it can be terse

I'm looking for a set of basic essentials, of sort, that can be taught 
to a beginner so that he/she can start coding useful stuff in, say, 
3 to 5 hours.

rebol.com has some tutorials...
http://www.rebol.com/docs/quick-start.html

My skills now are: reading/understanding the code; tweaking code 
to suit my purposes. That's about it.

Read those a couple of times. I teach C++. Know a dozen more languages, 
including Prolog.

If you don't mind reading code...exploring rebol.org is good, but 
can be time consuming.

Follow the links off rebol.org Articles page
to Brett Handley's site...
http://www.codeconscious.com/rebol/

To come to the point of teaching Rebol, I will have to find some 
structure in the language that permits me to extract the "basic essentials" 
in view to start students to code in a relatively short time.

ok. I will. Tks.

Enjoy...REBOL, being light, is pretty deep wide and somewhat 'hidden' 
 :)

yes, that is a problem as far as learning goes.

Like a Zen koan ;-)

Yep, very much.  But efforts are afoot to alleviate this.  If you 
know french, those books
get good reviews.

The truth is there, in some senseless sentence, but you have to self-destruct 
to get to it.

Yes, I know French. Some day soon I'll dish out the money.

Not sure they offer some "fast track" though

I've never read them...only the reviews.  :)

:-)

Here's a nice tutorial.. http://musiclessonz.com/rebol.html

I second Brock's suggestion  :)

I hadn't seen this one. Based on View? I was assuming it to be simpler 
to stick with Rebol/core. Maybe not.  This one seems real good at 
a glance. Tks Brock. And tks btiffin for all the pointers.

view is core for all except gui. + some commands ending with -thru, 
'read-thru and such. they are the same as the short form, but use 
a cache.

I wish he would use shorter paragraphs.

Reichart: I'm surprised the tools you are wishing for in order to 
start holding online classes aren't already build in Rebol... From 
what I've seen, all the bits and pieces seem to be there already, 
maybe except for a whiteboard. No?

Rebol is a language...

Well I did'nt mean "built-in" in Rebol, but built using Rebol, of 
course.

To everyone:

What characterize a good learning book? Do you prefer thick books 
with deep explanation and many examples, or do you prefer the thin 
book with the essentials? Look at your collection of technical book; 
about computer languages, OSs, databases or what you have. Which 
ones do you like, and which ones is no-good?

the bigger the better

and preferably with water proof pages so I can read it in the bath 
:)

lol, you're special!

I have some big books I like, but my favorites tend to be smaller. 
I love Jon Bentley's books, and anything by Robert Glass (almost 
wrote Philip Glass there :-), Kernighan, and DeMarco and Lister are 
other favorites.

I actually bought some HP tough paper for this purpose.  It's water 
proof and and can be printed upon with laser printers.

and very expensive

So, I can debug my programs in the bath :)

:-D

Hi everyone,

I'm a newbie and wanted to ask this question on a simple rebol program. 
 If I have a variable COUNT and I wanted to write this value with 
a literal could I do this:  write OutFile [Count " Total lines"]/append. 
 But the word Count is not evaluated and I get "Count Total lines" 
instead of "8 Total lines".  What do I need to tell rebol to return 
the value of COUNT?

hi Patrik,

try this:

write OutFile reduce [Count  " Total lines"]

Rebolek - Does the word REDUCE evaluate all values in the block?

yes

Thank you -- I'll try it

If you do not want to evaluate everything, use compose:
compose [(count) " Total lines"]

then only values in parens get evaluated

Works -- Thank you

A suggestion: Many words in REBOL can do more than one thing, sometimes 
depending on data-type of the argument or the use of refinements. 
It's almost impossible to remember it all. So as a new one to the 
language, check the help for the new words, you're learning. Like
>> ? reduce
>> ? compose