Prototyping

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The numbers might not make sense, but I'm still curious about whether Software Carpentry would make sense as a book. To find out, I spent five hours converting the existing lecture on regular expressions to chapter format. I'd welcome feedback about how useful this is. In particular, without the highlighting and animation of PowerPoint slides and video, how much harder is it to understand what's going on? What could be done to make it easier? More pictures? (I really want to draw arrows to point at the tabs and spaces in the sample data files...) Fully hyperlinked audio? Side-by-side display of code and text (which would be difficult to squeeze in, but not impossible)? Please let me know...