Useful software reference and tutorial documentation

When I learn a new software tool, generally the first thing I do is rewrite their documentation. I find that I retain things a lot better when I have to document them than if I just read a manual about them.

Here are some reference and tutorial documents that I've written. Most carry a Creative Commons license.

• Python 2.7 quick reference (PDF) : The author's favorite general-purpose programming language. (A 3.x version is in the works.)
• Tkinter 8.5 reference: a GUI for Python (PDF)
• NumPy quick reference (PDF) : Numeric and scientific packages for Python.
• Introduction to color theory (PDF) : Basics of the physics and perception of color, and ways to describe a color.
• A Python 2.7 Tutorial (PDF).
• XML document authoring with emacs nxml-mode: The author's preferred tool for creating and editing XML files. It can validate the entire file against a schema after every keystroke.
• XSLT Reference: XSLT is a pure functional programming language whose purpose is to transform an XML document into HTML, a different XML document, or to plain text.
• Writing documentation with DocBook-XML 5.0: DocBook is an XML-based general-purpose documentation tool that produces both a PDF and chunked HTML from the same source file.
• A DocBook 5.0 customization layer: This document describes how the author customized DocBook's HTML and PDF presentation styles.
• pyparsing quick reference: A Python text processing tool. This is not a complete recursive-descent parser builder, but it's quite handy for putting up parsers for simple tasks like reading log files.

Last updated: 2016/04/18 18:56:19
URL: http://www.nmt.edu/~shipman/doc/homepage.html