GNA Internet Course on Literate Programming
Here is a link to the virtual courseware for a GNA OOP course
to get an impression of this kind of self-paced course. It also contains
HTML samples.
The following is a preliminary specification for a course to be held
in the virtual teaching equipment of
Globewide Network Academy [GNA] -- affiliated to the Usenet University project.
Curricular matters are discussed in an own
GNA working group.
This announcement was posted to
the GNA discussion group
alt.uu.future
in September 1993. If you are interested in either attending this course
as a student, or want to help as a consultant, please send a
statement of your interests to marcus@x4u.desy.de.
You will receive a standard reply message; after that but probably not
before summer 1994, you will receive further details and a questionnaire.
- Course Name:
-
Introduction to Literate Programming
- Description:
-
This class is to serve as an introduction to the philosophy and techniques
of "literate programming"
[LitProg],
an approach to structured documentation and
sotfware engineering using the popular, freely available (La)TeX formatter.
The courseware still has to be developed - many excellent manuals and
User's guides (as well as a book by
D.E. Knuth,
author of the first LitProg tool for Pascal) exist for the various LitProg
tools and may serve as a starting point. The LitProg community is a very
active, enthusiastic
group of programmers, supported by a
newsgroup,
a mailing list,
FAQs, a
World Wide Web library of documents,
and archives
for all the free
tools
available (for various languages and environments).
- Prerequisites:
-
Knowledge of at least one programming language. (Which one still
has to be discussed). Basic knowledge of (La)TeX (or which formatter?)
not required, but taught during preliminary sessions.
- Format:
-
Consultant/self-paced. The text for this class will be based on
texts, sample programs and (maybe) exercises which be made available via
anonymous ftp.
There will be a consultant's room in the
GNA virtual campus which will
be staffed by a consultant in one to two hour shifts.
Students with questions can telnet to the virtual campus and ask questions
of the staff there.
- Date and Length:
- Summer or fall '94 - depending on how much net response is
there and how fast the courseware can be prepared. Approx. 10 weeks.
- To-do:
-
The course material has to be written.
People willing to join the list of consultants for this course may contact
me anytime.
- Enrollment limit:
- 5-10 students per consultant.
- Tuition:
-
Students must agree to work for Globewide Network Academy in some capacity.
This may include agreeing to serve as a consultant next term, donating
computing resources which belong to them, helping with programming, etc.
Addendum: some students could apply their fresh knowledge to prepare a
literate programming document for the
GNA C++ Course: Here are some
sample files showing how
another GNA course on
C++ could profit from this idea.
In fact, this approach may be chosen for any future programming course.
- Newsgroups:
-
comp.programming.literate
(gatewayed to LitProg mailing list),
alt.uu.future.
See also WWW information at the DESY server
- Books:
-
Donald E. Knuth, "Literate Programming",
CLSI (Center for the Study of Language and Information) Lecture Notes
Number 27, Leland Stanford Junior University, 1992.
ISBN 0-937073-81-4, Price: $32 (in April 92)
- More information:
-
Copyright (C) 1993-94 by Globewide Network Academy [GNA], Inc.
Distributed under the terms of the
GNU General Public License.
You may make and distribute verbatim copies of this text provided
the GNA copyright notice appears on all such copies.
Last updated March 27, 1994