Permission to translate the book about nimprogrammingbook HOT 3 OPEN

Dear Dr Salewski,

You truly give meaning to the concept of a Doctor as an educator. The nim community is honoured to have such a Doctor helping advance knowledge in the language and its uses.

While the book is still being developed on your website, a link to this GitHub IN THE INTRODUCTION/HEADER for people to contribute would be helpful (I was certainly not aware the source was on GitHub).
A link to a patreon would not hurt either; I personally would donate towards such a well formed source such as yours with its development.

My intention will be to provide spelling and grammatical corrections now that I have found the source project.

There is also a great niche in every learning platform that provides video courses on programming subjects as I have not yet encountered nim-lang courses. While I can understand your apprehension to forming video series, it would be a matter of you finding a person to act as the medium for creating the "vocal" english content (if that was the part you are not comfortable with).

I hope you and your family have been well throughout this pandemic and the floodings in Germany.

Thanks,
Shayan

from nimprogrammingbook.

my book is mostly for kids

I would disagree with this; it is a perfect resource for anyone wanting to learn programming/coding/scripting. I picked up programming as an adult while working at a pharmacy to develop a GUI application to serve our needs. Now that I wish to further this project I have picked up nim. Most users who learn programming/coding such as me tend towards Python due to its low barrier of entry and extensive resources. Any language benefits from more users at any stage and this resource you have developed provides that lowered barrier of entry. Naturally I can understand there is a disconnect from those heavily involved with system programming/computer science with those who simply want to make something and learn the skills for their own purposes which results in the current resources being heavily documented for those with the background to understand them.

There are a lot videos available already, and Nim page promotes them

To be frank, I think they have simply promoted the ‘best’ resources available. As someone with ADD those videos are painful to watch. When you have a ‘learning disability’ you realise how terrible most educational resources are. There is also the issue that while there are basic videos available, as you have said, they are unable to cover the more advanced topics and uses since they are unable to take advantage of them themselves.

I have spent numerous hours scouring for answers to what should be well documented questions. Rather than scouring the forums for how to use templates in what should be quite a typical manner, there should be a set of resources already available that explain and show the typical REAL use cases. I didn’t truly understand how to use templates and locks until I spent the time digesting the source code for the threadpool and locks module. While that is a very good way to learn, it is a high barrier of entry in effort that would not be spent by most people.

It can be argued that nim is still in heavy development; however, this lack of documentation is what hamstrings new-entry from non-programming/computer science users.

None of this is really pertinent to anything other than me trying to demonstrate the importance of documents such as yours to all ages and users even within nim. Perhaps this is more of a rant for me than any issue to be taken with you.

Thank you for your time and effort; I will certainly bring up any sections I think could be explained better etc.

from nimprogrammingbook.

While the book is still being developed on your website, a link to this GitHub IN THE INTRODUCTION/HEADER for people to contribute would be helpful (I was certainly not aware the source was on GitHub).

Yes you are right, I should add a link in the HTML formated book to the Asciidoctor source code at github. But indeed most people who know about the existence of the book would not have much trouble to find the github sources, to contact me per email or on Nim forum. But as the book is not listed at Amazon some people do not know about its existence at all. Nim core devs do not really promote it -- well they may have their reasons, maybe want to sell the Manning book or write a new one their self? And well my book is mostly for kids, and we have not that many kids in the Nim community currently, I think we had a few some years ago.

A link to a patreon would not hurt either;

Unfortunately the number of "customers" is tiny yet. Getting maybe 50$ from a dozen of readers would not make a difference for me. But when the number of readers should increase to a few hundred each year, then some form of monetary compensation would make sense. We will see.

My intention will be to provide spelling and grammatical corrections now that I have found the source project.

I would recommend to concentrate on the content first. Is all provided information fully correct and easy to understand? What is missing? For gramer and spelling various tools exists, which I can use to fix that. But makes not that much sense as long as the book is still in development -- indeed I intend to continue in winter. And for the case that the book is ever finished and we may even create a paper version I may hire a native proofreader. I would consider accepting a co-author for the really demanding stuff like macros, threading, async -- maybe. But only very few people are able to write about that stuff in highest quality, and async and threading are still in heavy development.

provides video courses

There are a lot videos available already, and Nim page promotes them:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvwc2YT9MFOlPPexrsY-t7BNTdg2Vsx06

And there are some more. And also the videos of NimConf and similar talks.

I should better not comment about the quality of the Kiloneie video series, but some people really seems to like them. Its a funy fact that some people like to produce videos BEFORE they learn a language and before they have written some larger high quality tools in that language. But I think at least some of the NimConf videos are OK, I have indeed watched a few of them.

I hope you and your family have been well throughout this pandemic and the floodings in Germany.

Yes all fine. No flood here in northern Germany, and I will get my first Biontec vaccine in the next few days :-)

from nimprogrammingbook.