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From: ns@CAT.CMU.EDU (Nicholas Spies)

Date: 28 Feb 88 17:53:58 GMT

>Dan Winkler, author of HyperTalk, wrote:
>"I can't be the one to tell you that any particular book is dog meat, but I
>desperately want you to figure it out on your own and you haven't been doing
>too well so far."

Perhaps Dan Winkler would do himself and the world a favor if he wrote the
definitive HyperTalk book; he could do for HC what K&R does for C. AND his 
first name is "Dan", which seems to be sine qua non for HC books so far :->

I learned HC from a printout of the "Help" stack and an early release of
APDA stuff; the "Help" stack should simply be expanded, by Apple, to cover
the undocumented stuff in HC, as well as XCMD stuff. It would be fairly easy
to for Apple to supply ALL documentation on-line rather than supplying alot
of stacks that are useful only for total novices. Indeed, this would be a
perfect demonstration of the power of HyperCard...

Instead, Apple has included only partial information, giving Danny Goodman
the opportunity to print money (reported 100,000 sales) but his extremely
poorly-indexed, overlong book _still_ doesn't tell half the story. I
immediately got the feeling that Apple gave Goodman this opportunity because
of his MacWorld and PC World connections. Another extremely annoying tie-in
is the free advertising that Goodman has gotten with the release of the demo
"Business Class", which is plugged in his book as well. I flipped through
Shafer's book, but decided that paying another ~$25 wasn't going to double
my understanding of HC so I didn't. Even if Dan Winkler is right, his diatribe
can only have a chilling effect on others trying to make a buck providing
information that Goodman and Apple haven't (at least in a usable form).

What is needed is a straight-forward, spriral-bound book (to lie flat) about
the size of the Laserwriter manual that tells all, with an alphabetized
section with every HyperTalk keyword explained in full in 1-3 pages apiece,
with code examples and caveats. Another section should groups keywords by
function, with pointers to the main entries. And, it needs a complete index.
Come to think of it, this sounds alot like the HC help stack...it just needs
to be completed and rearranged a bit.



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Re: WARNING: Bad HyperTalk books

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What links to Re: WARNING: Bad HyperTalk books?