TL;DR
The Clojure documentation project continues to progress nicely. Several guides now have more than 2/3rds of the content written and the team begins to tackle harder guides such as Concurrency and Parallelism in Clojure.
CDS Progress Report
Not so long we announced the new Clojure Documentation Site (a.k.a. CDS) effort. Now we publish periodic reports (every week so far, possibly two weeks in the future) to give the Clojure community a better idea of what CDS shapes up to be and what it has to offer.
This is a report for the week ending October 21st, 2012.
Overview
This week was spent mostly refining and expanding the material we’ve added last week. This means there are fewer commits and the diff is smaller but a lot more time went into reading and editing.
There was, however, some new content, too.
New Content
This week we started working on the first out of 3 “advanced” guides: Concurrency and Parallelism in Clojure. It is a very broad topic, with lots of material to write and some areas not-so-trivial to explain to absolute beginners. At the same time, it covers some of the key Clojure design decisions and some of the most attractive points of the language, so we are happy to work extra hard on this subject. And it’s always good to review your own understanding of concurrency by writing this content.
Updates
A number of guides is getting pretty close to be considered “75% done”:
- clojure.core Overview
- Interoperability with Java
- Namespaces
- Polymorphism: Protocols and Multimethods
- Collections and Sequences
Thank You, Contributors
CDS would not be possible without the following people who make Clojure community a better place:
- Daniel Jomphe
- Gareth Jones
- John Gabriele
- Lee Hinman
- Michael S. Klishin
- Robert Randolph
You Can Help!
How It Works
We have a repository on GitHub that has Markdown files, toolchain setup instructions and several articles as well as stubs for several more articles. The stubs help contributors pick a topic to write about and not worry too much about article structure initially. Just pick something that you are very familiar with or interested in and write.
When you are done, submit a pull request on GitHub and someone from the existing contributors team will suggest improvements or merge your work. Pretty straightforward.
In order to make it easier for potential contributors to join the project, we will post a brief list of guides that do not require deep expertise and can benefit from contributions by complete beginners.
Existing Guides
Tutorials that need work:
Guides that have structure and good chunk of the content in place but still have holes you can help us plug:
These guides are new and cover advanced topics, so we need as much proof-reading as we can get from the community:
New Content
If you want to start working on one of those articles or have existing content you’ve authored that can be ported, please let us know on the Clojure mailing list.
Summary
CDS is getting to the point of being a really useful resource to newcomers. We still have a very long way to go before Clojure documentation can be considered excellent but close enough to the point when it can be recommended to newcomers without feeling bad about it.
Want to help us make things better? Join us!
On behalf of the Clojure Documentation Team