Tutorial?

[Ron Inbar]

Hello Daniel and the rest of you vtkFolks.

The VTK User's Guide does contain some useful information and examples.  In
my opinion, however, it falls short of serving as a solid reference on VTK.
It's just not comprehensive enough and it's not organized as a reference
book.  For example, I tried several times to get a working understanding of
VTK's image streaming mechanism using the User's Guide, but failed every
time.  It took me a while just to locate the discussion of this mechanism in
the guide.  When I found it, it turned out to be in the Developer's Guide
section, and the level of discussion was accordingly.  I just don't have the
time to sit down and write my own imaging filter just to understand how
those work.  If streaming is to improve my ability to use VTK effectively,
it needs decent documentation.  It took me many hours of frustration,
several posts to the list and quite a lot of luck to finally come across the
method SetInputMemoryLimit.  Even now I often come across all sorts behavior
I don't expect and can't explain.

Currently, my main source of information on VTK is the manual pages, most of
which are written offhandedly, with many omissions and poor explanations.
There should be a major improvement in this department, as well.

As things stand now, I feel that poor documentation is, by far, VTK's
biggest problem, and it's big enough to possibly deter me from using VTK in
the future.  I'm not sure there's a serious alternative to VTK at the
moment, but that shouldn't be an excuse for the poor documentation.

I apologize about the harsh tone this time.  I still think VTK is a
remarkable piece of software, perhaps one of the most remarkable pieces of
open source software out there today, but it did cause me quite a lot of
frustration due to the lacking documentation.

I hope this message will be taken in a constructive way.

Ron

----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel Gayo Avello <uov02539 at correo.uniovi.es>
To: vtk <vtkusers at gsao.med.ge.com>
Sent: Monday, November 15, 1999 01:06
Subject: Tutorial?


>         Hi, everybody! Do you know about a good tutorial or guide about
> VTK? By the way, has some of you bought the VTK User's Guide from
> Kitware? Is it good?
>
>         Thanks, Dani.
> --
> uov02539 at correo.uniovi.es
>
> http://drive.to/itneverrains
>



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