Hi Tedd,
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, the cookbook is certainly stale at the moment, sorry about that. It is my biggest priority at the moment, and we're working to bring it back to life. Here is what we're up to and the thinking behind it...
The main reason for rethinking the cookbook is it quickly became a dumping ground for all sorts of libraries, projects, writeups, notes etc i.e. it was really useful!! And that was just with a few users. But combined with the trac-based wiki/editor and monolithic svn repo, it was messy and getting out of hand very quickly. That's when we decided we needed a more scalable approach.
So what we decided based on what people were doing was to split the cookbook in to the concept of personal notebooks and a central community cookbook, and also allow every published program/library to live separately (i.e use lightweight/distributed repositories). The idea is Notebooks are for every user, and designed to support notes, writeups, projects in development, immature libraries, and can be of any "quality". The cookbook then becomes the central community resource, but is focused on "finished", high quality things like libraries and tutorials. In many cases, notebook pages are the development ground for what may become a cookbook page.
So we first tested this idea by introducing notebooks and publishing from the compiler, and I think (hope!) it went down very well. So we decided it was a good idea and are now redoing the cookbook to fit the model. As part of this we've been working on a new wiki engine that will allow us to use the same markup across the whole site, and do certain mbed-type-things very efficiently. As soon as we put that live, I think we'll be able to much improve these cookbook resources, and hope it'll grow to be a great community resource.
We'll be aiming to put a beta live of a new cookbook engine soon, so i'd be very interested if there is anyone who would be interested in:
- Helping test the new cookbook/wiki engine (markup, editor, ...)
- Help migrate, clean up and test some of the useful content from the old cookbook
If so, please tell us here, or send dan a message, and we'll tell you when it is available.
Thanks again for your feedback and support!
Simon
Tedd OKANO.
2
replies
I had a great experience last night in Japan.
A guy who is new to the mbed did a live video streaming (on USTREAM) while he tried to build a twitter demo on mbed.
He shared a actual development process from soldering a RJ45 connector on adapter board / wiring on breadboard to making mbed tweet on Internet.
While in this session, we found a problem on a example code (http://mbed.org/projects/cookbook/svn/EMAC/lwip/examples/HTTPClient) on the Twitter page in the Cookbook.
If user imported the code from that URL, it shows the errors so no executable can be build.
If we see the details about the HTTPCliant library carefully, it says it's a old one. But it may take time to find this message.
So If the Cookbook page is updated, it will be the great help for the new users.
I know that mbed recommends to edit/update Notebook instead of Cookbook. But still the Cookbook is a good entry point for the people who starts to play on the mbed (These people may know, later, the Cookbook had been frozen as a snapshot sometime before).
I believe if may be very very helpful If the page has updated information, like a poiner to an updated package http://mbed.org/users/chris/programs/EA_Twitter. This example fits current method of code importing.