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Re: I wanna contribute to LDP
On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Andrew P Moise wrote:
> So I'm stunned as always at how helpful a particular HOWTO has been to
> me, and I'd like the opportunity to give something back. Two things I
> think I'd be reasonably competent to do are:
> An Algorithms-HOWTO, a quick sketch of hash tables, sorting, red-black
> trees, heaps, and the like, for people who have no formal training in
> computer science but want to move from shell scripts to real programming
> (including links to proper-length documentation on the stuff).
To be completely selfish, I would love to see an Algorithm-HOWTO (I've
been moving from shell scripts to real programming for years, but never
quite seem to get there). I wouldn't be surprised if you identified a
sizable audience with this one.
> man pages on file formats; sox and gd nonwithstanding, there's been
> many a time when I just wanted to know what the header fields in an .au
> file were and had to spend a couple minutes on the web/in the source to
> find it out, and a man page with structs included would have made my
> life more convenient. Even the non-trivial formats like PNG or (ha!)
> MPEG could be explained in terms of record structure, with links to
> detailed explanations of the compression. I can't pledge the lifetime
> of work it would take to document them all, but I think I could make a
> not-quite-miniscule dent.
This also sounds like a worthwhile project, given that (in some
cases) file formats are far more stable than the programs that make use of
them.
Me being me, if I had to choose between your two proposed HOWTOs I would
probably want the Algorithm-HOWTO. But I look forward to whichever one (or
both!) you decide to work on.
Dan
--
Dan Scott,
Friend of the abnormal.
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