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Re: [mv] Reading documentation....
On Thu, Sep 23, 1999 at 01:58:28AM -0400, mikeh@minivend.com wrote:
> I have heard the MiniVend documentation described with adjectives ranging
> from "awful" to "great". I am doing a lot of documentation for MiniVend 4,
> keeping some things, removing lots of things, rewriting things, and adding
> new stuff. But sometimes that is hard work, so I need a place to vent.
It's both "great" and "awful", depending on what you are trying to get out
of it. MiniVend has an extremely steap learning curve, so when one is first
starting out, having a reference manual isn't enough.
Actually, I should ammend that, it has had a steap learning curve here, but
we've forced it to do things it was never intended to do. We have ours
working in a multi-store envoronment in a single catalog with a unified
checkout, but with individual billing (through PGP, CyberCash and
Authorize.net). There are a lot of things we've done where instead of
figuring out a MiniVend way to do it, we've just bypassed MiniVend
entirely... there was probably an easier way, but it was faster for us to
write it from scratch then figure out the MiniVend way.
My biggest complaint is that there are times that the documentation is
actually wrong. Having incorrect documentation causes more headaches then
almost anything else.
> I will let everyone in on a secret; I am not a programmer. At least I
> wasn't when MiniVend started. Those hardy few of you who have used
> MiniVend since 1996 or so will know this if you have read the code. There
> is much code in MiniVend 3 which is downright amateurish. The code that is
> new within the last couple of years is at a fairly high and professional
> level; or so I am told by people I respect.
Ah-hah! This explains a lot. I've seen other projects that have been
created in this manor (with the author learning the language as they went)
and they had similar source.
>
> But does it surprise anyone that I re-read the docs I have written? Not
> maybe as often as I refer to the source, but I do it all the time. I
> have to.
This explains why the documentation is almost exclusively reference manual.
And why at times the only way to get a good feel for how to do something was
to read the source.
--
Andy <turner@mint.net>
