Re: Starting using octave

[Christoph Dalitz]

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 13:26:54 -0600
"John W. Eaton" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 30-Nov-2003, robert Macy <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> | Just a simple list of "how to" step by step instructions
> | would have been greatly appreciated. A little more
> | attention toward the creation of the manual and having the
> | manual contain examples would have helped.  
> 
> Did you read the introduction to the Octave manual?  It does contain
> some basic tutorial information.  Perhaps it is not simple enough, or
> lacks some other essential component.  Unfortunately, I don't know how
> to make it much better.  Perhaps you, as someone who has recently had
> some trouble learning how to use Octave, could provide some concrete
> suggestions for how to improve it.  Better yet, it would be helpful if
> you, or someone else who is not satisfied with the current state of
> the manual, could help to improve it.
> 
I could translate my Octave introductory slides 
http://lionel.kr.hs-niederrhein.de/~dalitz/data/lehre/CBM/octave-4up.ps.gz
which I hand out my students into english.

If that were welcome: to whom can I send it?

> I like to think of this as a community effort, not a customer/vendor
> relationship.  But if only a few people are providing and many others
> are using, then I can see how there could be a misunderstanding.
> Also, to me, "customer" usually has some connotation of "paying".
> 
It is crucial that heavy Octave users give something back.

 a) University users can assign master theses for the implementation
    of numeric or computer science stuff.

 b) Industry users can pay developers like it is happening with
    the Scilab consortium.

It seems to me that b) is an essential point in each of the currently
successful free software projects (Linux kernel, PostgreSQL database,
Samba file sharing service, ...).

Christoph Dalitz



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