Monday, January 09, 2006

The Unauthorized Tutorials



In an online posting, the Brazilian programmer Américo Damasceno reminded me that the best way to learn something is to try and teach it. Américo certainly took this assertion to heart and decided that the best way for him to learn Croquet technology was to prepare a series of three of step-by-step online tutorials on Croquet and Squeak programming. The first of these is an Introduction to Basic Croquet Programming. The second is called Basic 3D Programming in Croquet. The third is a Step-by-Step Tutorial on Squeak 3.6.

In addition to the undoubted benefit that Américo has received by putting them together, many folks have told me that they can be quite useful and informative to those who wish to get started with Croquet (production value not withstanding). I know that there are a lot of readers of this blog who are programmers interested in getting their feet wet with the system. My advice to you is to walk through these tutirials as a way to begin exploring programming approaches in Croquet (that is, until someone prepares official tutorials for the v1.0 release). For those of you who are not programmers, there is a solution currently being developed that allows users to develop meaningful and interactive content in Croquet worlds without the need to program the system. It is code-named Brie. More on that in a future posting...

Please keep in mind that Américo's tutorials are based on the Jasmine developer's preview of Croquet and much of what they contain may not apply to v1.0 (which includes some very fundamental differences from the Jasmine developer's preview). Nonetheless, I direct people there since some programmers will unoubtedly find the tutorials very useful. Thanks to Américo for providing the emerging community with this valuable resource!

1 comment:

Américo Damasceno said...

Thanks, Julian.
Now I am working creating web3D applications using the beta of the Microsoft WPF, to be available in the launch of Windows Vista (end of 2006). There are many tutorials and demos about WPF at my site:
http://www.dmu.com

I hope to return to work with Croquet soon.