Hi guys,
LIke most new users of wxPython, I guess I'm suffering a bit from documentation
withdrawal -- the only wxPython docs I've been able to find is the modified
version of the wxWindows reference, with Robin's comments added where wxPython
differs from wxWindows itself. Apart from that, all I've found is the (alas,
brief and incomplete) tutorial on the wxPython web site, the notes included
in the official wxPython docs, and of course the demo -- which is an absolute
God-send so long as it covers the things you're trying to learn about, but as
soon as you try to go beyond the specific examples it covers, you end up doing
an awful lot of guessing...
Are there any other docs which I've missed out on, or is that it? Now, please
don't get me wrong: I'm not criticising...far from it! Robin has much better
things to do with his time than write detailed documentation and tutorials for
new users, and his approach of taking the wxWindows docs and adding notes
relevant to wxPython is an excellent trade-off, and combined with the demo is a
pretty good way of getting started -- as far as it goes.
It seems to me, though, that the main thing that wxPython is lacking is a
detailed set of documentation. wxPython itself is an absolutely awesome GUI
toolkit, and combined with Python it's by far the best GUI development
enviroment I've seen in over twelve years of writing big, GUI-intensive
systems. It does, however, seem to be shackled by the lack of in-depth
documentation. If the documentation was as good as wxPython itself (including,
say, a detailed user's guide, a Python-specific reference, extended tutorials
and a cookbook of solutions), new users would have a much easier time, and I'm
sure wxPython would become much more popular as a result.
I see from the mailing list archives that various people have raised this
bugaboo in the past, but nothing seems to have come of it. If there really
isn't anyone working on extending the wxPython docs, I'd be keen to tackle it
myself -- I've written quite a few tutorials and reference manuals in the past, so I'm
not exactly a neophyte in this regard...and since I don't know C++ this is
probably the best contribution I could make to the wxPython project.
Now, I'm obviously still learning wxPython myself, but I've been collecting
notes about how the various parts of wxPython work, and in particular the
things which would be confusing to a novice. If it'd be worthwhile, I'd be
happy to keep writing notes over the next few months as I learn, and then put
it all together into a new-user tutorial. A detailed user's guide, a cookbook
of common UI tasks and how to achieve them, and maybe even a Python-specific
reference, might all be possible after that...
Thoughts?
Cheers,
- Erik.