Book feedback

[mindoodoo]

Hey guys, was able to take a look at the ratatui book last weekend, overall looks absolutely amazing ! I jotted down a few notes so here they are, will try and open PRs when I get a chance, however still quite busy with school over here.

General comments

• The tutorials are inconsistent in the way of laying out the code. For example the counter app single function approach (2.2.1) starts by laying out all the code, and then going through it step by step as opposed to 2.2.2 where it goes through the code step by step and then gives the full code at the end. Although this should of course depend a little bit on the tutorial, we could probably make it a little more consistent.
  • Another example would be the json editor tutorial that only gives the full code in the conclusion chapter
• Some notions presented in a noob friendly way could maybe have more external links to articles, tutorials, documentation and what not. Would really help spike the interest of beginners reading the book. Dunno if I make sense here haha.
• The stopwatch app looks awesome, but maybe removing the big code block in favour of simply linking to the code folder might be a bit better ? The code block is really big relative to the explanations provided.
  • Of course an alternative would be to add more explanations to the code, but imho it doesn't really make sense to keep a big code block like this one in the book when a link could suffice.
• Is there any particular reasoning for having the tutorials so soon in the book ? Maybe we could move them a bit further back after we've introduced common concepts and architectures in ratatui. Something like right after section 4.
  • This would be similar ish to what's done in the rust book that introduces the concepts first and then features the first project in section 12.
• Section 3.3. could benefit from a comparison of the different application architectures, as well as potentially something similar to the backend selection flowchart.
  • Would also help to have each architecture consistently present it's pros and cons. From what I've seen only the 3.3.3. Flux Architecture presents pros to it's architecture (no cons though).
• 4.2.2. doesn't mention the stylize trait

Nit picks

• The tip in section 1. might mislead readers to thinking that most widgets require the all-widgets flag
• Would be nice to state that the counter tutorial will present three different ways of writing it in it's introduction (2.2)
• The code examples don't all use the same tab size
• Since 3.3. Application Patterns really only presents architectures, maybe it could be renamed "Application Architectures". Although that depends on wether or not more content will be added there in the near future.

I'll try and open some PRs for some of these comments but don't know how much I'll be able to get done as I'm really busy with classes and my graduation project. The book has come such a long way since it's inception, it's really neat to see !

[mindoodoo]

Closed as moved to #66