TLDR; I recommend that the CKB community not be influenced by the tutorials we are creating and assess this proposal as an independent endeavor.
What We’re Working On
At Cryptape, we are currently focusing on creating new tutorials and how-to guides. We believe that a critical missing component in CKB documentation is detailed step-by-step guides designed for specific use cases that could help developers build what they want.
Currently, we are working on two new tutorials:
Hello World - A simple tutorial that will give developers an idea of what it’s like to work with CKB.
An NFT How-To - This tutorial will explain how to create and have fun with NFTs on CKB, along with explanations of key concepts and helpful tips.
Thoughts on Documentation
Technical documentation consists of different types of documents such as references, tutorials, how-to guides, and explanations. Tutorials serve as entry-level documents to show developers basic operations while how-to guides provide step-by-step instructions for completing specific tasks. References are accurate handbooks used to get more details about SDK/API (sometimes auto-generated) and understand the inner workings (not every developer cares), while explanations provide insight into why things were designed a certain way or the history/principles behind them.
Technical documentation is part of developer education which requires teaching skills beyond just being a good developer. Developers can do the job but sometimes they’re not the best teachers. For example, Andreas M. Antonopoulos who authored is not a Bitcoin core team member. Each teacher has their own style and techniques, some make their students laugh some don’t.
While we already have a solid permissionless platform (which recently passed 10m blocks without pause!), what we need most are various forms of developer education materials along with gifted “teachers” and advocates who can help others learn how to build on CKB.
I’d be happy to witness more efforts toward developer education. It is possible that the most exceptional and well-received documentation could originate from someone within our community, who knows!
these articles are clear. Perhaps we need a better page to organize these articles, so that interested people can have a single entry to understand the big picture of CKB’s core design.
At present, what the CKB community lacks most is not these contents, but programming paradigms, best practices, and more cases about the cell model (target of Part5). So far, there are still a small number of people who really understand and grasp the huge potential of the Cell model. We need more people to understand the cell model and explore its possibilities in more dimensions.
In view of the fact that the total reserve of CKB Community Dao is only more than 200 million CKB and its current low price, it is necessary to carefully consider the extraction of 37 million CKB for Textbook. Perhaps it is reasonable to some extent to denominate in US dollars.
BTW, I think this is a great material for learning development on CKB, but it is in Chinese and out of date. (Welcome to CKB Docs)
I think the main target of this book should be developers. It is most appropriate to write directly on github or gitbook. Since it is similar to tutorials, it should only be deployed on the testnet. To sum up, I don’t think 2, 4, and 5 of the funds are necessary.
On nervos, do you have other projects besides Tempest, after all Tempest is not going on
@tianlitao I worked at the foundation lol. No, I don’t have any applications currently running on Nervos.
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My profile on this forum site can give an idea of what some of the things I’ve done.
Those articles touch upon the topics that would be covered. I agree the topics overlap… this isn’t different from, say, the fact that an article posted in hackernoon can cover how servers work, as does a textbook on networking architecture.
Which is more in depth and appealing to the highly technical person?
I guess what you’re saying, then, is you don’t think information at textbook-level depth for these topics is worth the cost at the moment?
I stand by Tanner’s proposal. You would be keen to observe the positive externalities taking place in this proposal, such as Tanner’s attention to Nervos as a base for app development in parallel. His textbook would be the first stepping stone of a bigger picture.
Indeed, I think the CKB community does not need more content to discuss why CKB is better from the dimensions of consensus algorithm, programming model, economic model, etc. There have been many such elaborations, and this is not something that ordinary developers are keen to pay attention to.
And these explanatory content occupies most of the space in your arrangement.
What the community lacks is what better things can be made through CKB. Because in the past few years, the community has been always discussing why CKB’s various designs are better, but there is no really concrete thing to show, I can open a post on talk to index all these contents if needed.
Use the Cairo Documentation as an example, Cairo Documentation. First, it teaches developers to set up the environment, and then they can focus on learning programming and practicing. Towards the end, there is more in-depth information about how Cairo works. If developers are interested, they can read it, but it is not necessary to do so.
Hello, @tannr , I’ve been working in the Nervos community for many years. During this time, I’ve interacted with many users and developers who have expressed difficulty in understanding the design of CKB. While we have written numerous articles explaining the design background and principles of CKB for ordinary users, the biggest challenge currently lies in providing a comprehensive cookbook or programming guide for developers, As @orange-xc mentioned, something similar to Hello, Cairo — Cairo documentation. Currently, our documentation is scattered across various GitHub repositories, lacking a unified and cohesive resource.
I have carefully read the first four parts of your proposal, and they primarily consist of theoretical content. These materials are already well-established, and as developers, if they need to understand these theoretical aspects, they would likely refer to more specialized sources such as GitHub - nervosnetwork/rfcs: This repository contains proposals, standards and documentations related to Nervos Network.. Therefore, the first four parts of your proposal may not be very meaningful in terms of helping developers learn CKB programming, would it be possible to put these parts aside from this proposal? Since you have experience in CKB development, could you focus on planning the practical aspect of development? If you can write a “CKB Programming Guide” or publish a series of video tutorials on CKB programming, it would undoubtedly be of great help to developers.
In light of the above, would you be willing to reconsider your proposal?
Hello, it was my interpretation that he is producing a physical textbook that can be held in universities. Like Andreas Antonopoulos’ Mastering series. I think the theory behind it was a key pillar to its overall success. If we wanted it to be a pure programming guide it would probably be a different proposal. I’m still in support of the original textbook route as long as it has community input.
I disagree; those introductory, practical material is already being developed elsewhere. While articles have been written about the principles of CKB design, the content in the textbook not intended to function as a “look, CKB is amazing because its design theoretically allows X” (i.e., it puts CKB right next to other L1’s and in some cases it will note disadvantages, even). Rather, it is a textbook for people aspiring to be top tier technical contributors in the industry, with CKB as a primary example of unique design choices.
The content you mention only gives bits and pieces. It doesnt give a framework for evaluating the tradeoffs of networks or their design decisions, etc.
I understand the desire for purely practical, basic content and I agree it needs to exist. Others are already creating it. The core value proposition of this proposal is that there is something else missing in the education narrative.
In my opinion, a strong theoretical foundation is quite necessary and I dont think it is yet been done justice in current texts
No, the Nervos community is inclusive and we can even tolerate you. I just think we should compete in business with a spirit of idealism rather than just engaging in academic research, and that we need products rather than more rhetoric.