The bigger problem as I see it (from my closed little world) is that people feel entitled to perfect documentation, perfect software, and that the other people who use this thing are going to be really nice and take large chunks of time to help them. People write open source tools like CakePHP, Symphony, Code Ignighter, Rails, Spring, Open Office, you name it, because they like to write software (sometimes I think to make themselves feel smarter then the rest of us) They do these things that I can not imagine having the time and focus to create, these communities build up around them.

I think, just like I come off in this as ‘sour grouch’ and you want to portray yourself as a noob (which is fine but you are not the noob I was frustrated with at the time) mostly we ‘are’ these things in this context to make a point. To me the key is that people who look at using these frameworks and other ‘open project’ realize that the people who built them have no obligation to help you, that people should stop acting like the developers and other users have to help you, they do it because they want to they are not paid (I realize some open source projects do have sponsors and do have paid people). So be polite, ask with respect, and don’t poke the bear

Thanks for the comment, I’ll try to be less grumpy in the future…

The whole thing is written like some kind of superfluous conversation with a guru of some incomplete framework. There’s no standardized way of presenting things. Examples attempt to be impressive rather than enlightening. All very basic elitism. This wouldn’t bother me if the manual was right.

Unfortunately as I’ve been learning over the last week or so, I’ve actually found a number of blatant errors/contradictions in the Cookbook. Naturally I’ve submitted edits, but I don’t think this attitude of hostility towards noobs is warranted from someone who has “actually read the manual”. Maybe you read it and were able to extrapolate through experience an understanding of the language, but have you read it and checked for things like readability? I suppose it may not be the aim of the Cookbook to teach complete noobs, but if its the only place a noob can go to learn, what do you expect?

Some people have suggested creating separate mailing lists for noobs and pros. Being a noob myself, I’d be open to having separate bloody sites. UnbakedNoob.com?

Either way, I don’t care to take sides in a battle between the extremes of elitism and complete ignorance. I will plod along diligently, steering clear of sour grouches like yourself.

One last note: I understand the motivation between filing thorough support requests. Most times I find my error half way to hitting the submit button. They drilled this idea into us in the CS courses I took. If cake makes development so bloody easy, why not make a form for cake support requests? That way a user could not submit until they had entered version, offending code, error message, server settings, etc.

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