[MirageOS-devel] mirage tutorials

[Richard Mortier <Richard.Mortier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

there's been a repeated mention of a mirage tutorial day, both as a specific 
event and as a means to generate a set of tutorial materials that could be used 
elsewhere (eg., the upcoming ECOOP tutorial, the website). given the range of 
possibilities here, the only sane thing to do seems to throw it open to the 
list to discover some preferences :)  so...

(a) what would be the preferred mode of a delivery?

the current proposal is to have content as markdown files that can be included 
in mirage-www, perhaps even hosting them as github wiki pages to be pulled in 
to mirage-www so that updating them becomes relatively easy. working through 
these pages would then form the basis of any formal delivery of them. other 
options mentioned at various points include codio, iocamjs, etc. to provide 
interactivity "inline". 

does anyone have any opinions, suggestions, thoughts, objections to this?

(b) what would be the important content to deliver?

as a strawman starting point, i propose the following: basically, each chunk of 
content should take 30-90min to work through; and the important/useful topics i 
immediately thought of are:

+ getting started [45min]. 
        mirage, ocaml, opam. installation. building skeleton/hello-world. 
config.ml.
        basically working through the install page

+ threading [90min]. 
        lwt. bind/return/join/pick/choose/etc. (careful) use of syntax 
extension. mailboxes.
        basically working through the existing Lwt tutorial page

+ networking [90min]. 
        up to local running website. based off the stuff i did for fosdem in 
mirage-skeleton.

+ storage [90min]. 
        crunch vs fat. dave's blog post example? what else?

+ cloud [30min].
        pushing stuff to the cloud. do we have examples of this?  mindy's blog 
post?!

+ irminsule [90min].
        more advanced, git-structured storage backend. thomas to provide...?

+ mirage combinators [90min].
        more advanced mirage combinators -- mux from thomas' tree at some point 
(any others?). 
        maybe a walk through of the mirage tool code itself in case advanced 
users want to hack it?

(a basic tutorial probably covers getting started, threading and cloud and/or 
networking from that depending on length and how much ocaml background is 
assumed.)

...but there's also things like vchan, arm, bsd, openflow that i can imagine 
would also be useful to cover. 

does anyone have any particular topics to add/remove from that?

any particular views on whether my estimated timings are wildly off base?

finally, does anyone have thoughts on how to handle the ocaml-dependency any 
mirage tutorial will have?  if material is hosted online, there're ocaml 
tutorials (even the odd book or two :)  to point to -- but for delivering the 
tutorial live, i particularly wondered what those new to ocaml and those with 
vast experience in ocaml thought about how much time it takes to get enough 
understanding to read sufficient ocaml to "follow along in class" even if 
actually understanding the details will require doing homework...?



-- 
Cheers,

R.

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