On Apr 29, 5:47 pm, Elizabeth D Rather <erat...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> gavino wrote:
...
>
> > I know you mentioned starting forth "not best" tutorial, what is best?
>
> Well, I have to mention my two books, "Forth Application Techniques"
> (which is a real tutorial, with problem sets, for beginning Forthers)
> and "Forth Programmer's Handbook", which is a more detailed reference
> book. Handbook was extensively revised in summer 2007, and is pretty
> up-to-date. The other is the book FORTH, Inc. uses for its Forth
> courses. Both can be ordered through FORTH, Inc. or Amazon.
>
> Cheers,
> Elizabeth
I can second this, Gavino. I'm still very much a forth noobie and I
think Elizabeth's books are excellent.
I also got both Brodie's books just out of interest, there is a lot of
obsolete material (ie blocks and editor stuff) in Starting Forth but
nevertheless it's a good read. Thinking Forth is good for food for
thought.
There's also Stephen Pelc's forth book, which is excellent and free to
download
http://www.mpeforth.com/arena.htm
And of course Julian Noble's stuff. May God grant him eternal peace.
Hopefully his tute will be archived for posterity.
http://www.forth.org/tutorials.html
- you can find other stuff here
too.
His book Scientific Forth is still available I believe online.
The one thing I've noticed is that forth is very polymorphic, when I
mean this, I mean there is a lot of advanced code out there that is
just not seen in beginner tutes, you see all kinds of ways of doing
stuff.
I'm only just beginning to touch the tip of the iceberg. I would
probably still consider myself 6th, maybe 5th kyu LOL. ie a white belt
vs a dan grade.
In many ways it's a very TIMWTOTDI type of language. Or metalanguage.
And because of differing ways forths are implemented, I think it's
also unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it)
much like programming in assembly, if you're interested in the most
efficient solution you've got to know the compiler and the hardware
you're working with. But that's where the fun is IMHO.
Forth. It's a great way of spending time having fun. But I can see how
if you actually need a working solution quickly, other languages may
be more appropriate. I don't quite much care. I'm a hobbyist, you see.
And oh, Gavino, this day and age I would strongly suggest running a
hosted Forth. Preferably on a reasonably robust OS like a *nix. That
way when you F up as you will do many times (as I certainly have), you
only do it in userland, you can get back up very quickly.
For example, I accidentally fork bombed myself the other day while I
was fixing the OSX lina ****t. LOL. That was fun.
Robert
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