Welcome to a series of tutorials on how to get the very best from Directory Opus 5, written by some of the most experienced DOpus users from around the world.

This tutorial is designed to be easy to use and as informative as possible, giving you the best information in the best way for use inside DOpus. Before we start in on the lessons, it's probably best to describe how the tutorials are set out, and how they relate to Directory Opus.

Starting
In our first section, aimed at existing, but inexperienced, DOpus users, or people ready to migrate from version 4 or another file management program, we'll go over the philosophy of Directory Opus. We'll cover the ways in which DOpus, as a Workbench replacement, is different to other file managers, and how your experience with other, inferior, file managers can be put to good use with DOpus 5. We'll also deal with ways to set up Directory Opus to make it more efficient, or simply to impress others, since we know that Amiga users like tweaking the way their machines look and behave in order to make them as impressive as possible. We'll be going through DOpus' main features, such as the lister, button bank and others in order to clarify them for users and introduce new elements which may have previously been overlooked.

Advanced
The second section of this tutorial is for more advanced users seeking to really get the best out of their setup. We'll deal with an advanced, hierarchical filetyping system in detail and introduce and expand upon other extensions to the Amiga's flexible filing system that can add extra benefit for Dopus users.

Coding
Programming is the theme for our third section, with in-depth guides to DOpus' ARexx port and module programming in C complete with examples of how to write your own scripts and modules to customise DOpus to best suit you.

Fun Stuff
Last, but definitely not least, our fourth section will concentrate on the lighter side of using DOpus, including using add-on commodities and what sort of things to watch out for.

Throughout the tutorial we'll maintain a convention of use. You'll see the regularly. It refers solely to the Right Amiga key. Other keyboard shortcuts will be referred to in text, like CTRL, ALT or DEL. The left mouse button will often be referred to as LMB and the right mouse button as RMB. If we refer to the middle mouse button for three-button mouse users, it will be as MMB. In case you hadn't noticed, you'll also see a little "index" button in the top right hand corner of every tutorial. The ones in the sub-chapters lead you to individual areas of that chapter, the ones in the main page for each section reference the whole section, while the one in the intro page references the whole set of tutorials. You'll also see these handy hint boxes scattered throughout the tutorial:

By default, double clicking the right mouse button inside a lister will pop up the edit lister window.

Remember also that if there's something you should type into DOpus in these tutorials you can simply copy the text as it is from this browser by dragging your mouse over the text in question...

The aim throughout these tutorials is helping you:

"To boldly Opus where no Workbench has been before."

Whodunnit?

Onwards and upwards!