Am Montag 10 Dezember 2012 23:52:26 schrieb Pavel Afonine:
I've been having this plan too for quite some time, and yes, I've never had time to do anything (and most likely wouldn't in near future). However doing it collectively may cut on amount of time and effort, thus making it practical in the end.
I would plan it first. To start, I would say we need:
1) find out who wants to participate; 2) write a framework and agree on it. I see it as a list of bullet points outlining the subjects that we are going to cover. 3) then we see who wants (and can) to cover what and do the first step: everybody fills in his/her contribution. 4) then we collectively review the whole thing, and do a few iterations of that until we are satisfied with what we have.
Additional thoughts:
I know it may make things slightly more complex, but I suggest that we make sure that every example provided in the tutorial is exercised as part of our routine tests. This will ensure that the effort we are going to invest will not be obsoleted shortly after it's complete. Also, this would imply the document may change if a cctbx functionality described in it changed (so it's not a static paper). I did this for command line version of phenix.refine several years ago, and it seems to work well (though I'm not saying that we should do it the same way for this tutorial!).
I have zero experience with Google Docs, so these couple of questions are rather out of my ignorance. Does it allow to 1) insert formulas, 2) put pieces of code that can be extracted automatically for exercising ?
Maybe I'm a little late to add to the discussion, but I think doing this as a wikibooks[1] project would be best. That way it can easily be found by people, a large user base can easily participate and the hosting is of no concern to us. Also LaTeX style formulas are available. [1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Science With regards, Dipl. Phys. Jan M. Simons Institute of Crystallography RWTH Aachen University