REBOL for beginners, from a beginner

This is a short explanation of why this page takes up valuable space on the internet.

This page is a sub-site that tries to be a training manual in the REBOL language for someone with a background in COBOL and all the mental constraints that might have come into being because of that background.

For a variety of reasons, there is the possibility that updates could end suddenly and forever. This page explains what you could do about it if you happen to like the content and would like to preserve it.

This site will, from its inception in 2015, have irregular updates that should increase in frequency as time passes. This page explains how you could keep on top of updates, automatically, without having to check here manually.

This is an old, but important, note from Carl Sassenrath about sofware complexity. Reprinted with permission.

This is a list of things (code modules, documents) from around the site, that anyone may have for free if anyone finds them useful. Take note: Scripts and some other files in the "free stuff" area are duplicated in a github account called "cobolrebol" where we hope they can be found if anything would happen to this site.

This is a re-working of the VID documentation into a format that looks more like a reference manual. This exists for those who prefer that format, and who find it easier to locate things in a document of this format.

This is a document similar to the REBOL cookbook on the REBOL web site, with some different examples, some different organization, and a small code snippet manager.

This is a document of tips for working with files that have data in a fixed format, where data is defined by character positions in a text file, or files that have data in a delimited format, as one might get from saving as a CSV file the data from one of the popular spreadsheet programs.

This is a short personal note about a sudden increase in my own understanding of REBOL that came to me after a vacation in a place that, in my opinion, has some features in common with REBOL.

This is a document of tips for a common "data processing" operation of makeing tables for looking up various things. For example, one might have states and postal codes, employee names and telephone extensions; things not big enough for an official database, or things in an application that is so small that a big database would be overkill.

This is a collection of short guides for installing on various platforms. That basically means three, so there is not a lot of new information here, but some of it could be helpful to people using non-windows computers.

After some years of using REBOL, I find myself going back to only a few web sites regularly for help. There are many other places, and I go to those also, but these are the ones I personally use most of the time, and so this list might be helpful to others.

In the spring of 2017 the rebol.org web site went down. The script library was recovered, and in a panic I grabbed a copy and have put it here in case it is useful to anyone. The rebol.org web site was restored, and so that is the place to go to find the current script library. Here you have just a backup copy as of April of 2017. This backup copy will not be maintained.

This is a short personal note that tries to capture a difficulty I personally had when I first encountered REBOL, in case anyone else shares my "handicap." It takes a short example of dense code and sort of de-rebolizes it, which is a bad thing, but an instructive thing.

This is a short perpsonal note on the evolutionary process of learning to use REBOL more like it was intended. It takes short examples of un-REBOL-like code and tightens them up with better uses of the unique REBOL syntax.

When desktop computers were first invented, a question that came up a lot was what to do with them. It seemed like somebody always suggested storing recipes. So to realize that long-held dream, here are some recipes and some programs for working with them.

This is a (small) collection of parsing examples. The ultimate goal of this document is to present enough examples of parsing so that even if a person can't quite understand parsing, he can solve his parsing problems by copying an idea from someone else.

This is a short article about how I got REBOL working with the Adventureworks database from Microsoft. It includes the story of what I had to do to get it operating, plus two examples of REBOL code.

This is a document of "patterns" that have developed as I have been doing REBOL coding. This could be of value in two ways. One would be as an aid to understanding programs you find here. Another would be as a bit of a "cookbook" to show how to do some things. This is not being presented as any sort of style guide. Real REBOL programmers might look at this with horror, which is why this site has no easy feedback options.

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