Links of interest to beginners

Date written: February 10, 2017
Date revised: May 31, 2017
Date reviewed: May 31, 2017

This page has links to other sites related to REBOL. If you are familiar with REBOL, you probably will have seen these sites. If you have stumbled upon this site and are not familiar with REBOL, this page will point you to where you probably should have started.

Home to www.cobolrebol.com

This is a page of links to other REBOL-related web sites. If you are familiar with REBOL, you probably will not find anything new here. If you have come across this site by accident and have not heard of REBOL, then this page could be useful as a map to Beginnerland, that is, a list of what to read in what order to make some use of the REBOL programming language.

What you see below is a table of links to REBOL-related web sites, with an "executive summary" as it were of why you might want to go there. The items in the list are presented in sort of an order, an order that might make sense to you if you are trying to understand REBOL from a point of no prior knowledge. The list is personal and incomplete. Is what I have found useful, with "useful" being defined as a place that I seem to keep going back to. Your own ideas will evolve and be different.

The above should be re-stated. This is not a complete list of REBOL documentation. For that, go to rebol.com and work your way through all the links there. The links below are what I would recommend if you want to learn REBOL and start to make use of it. The links below will help with that, and the farther you go down the list (beyond rebolforum.com) the further the links will be from that mission.

http://www.eskimo.com/~goody/links/back.to.prsnl.cmptng.html	This is the essay that "started it all." It is a note from the author of REBOL announcing his plan to create it. It is from 1997, and things have evolved since then. Read this for inspiration.
http://www.rebol.com/	This is the main REBOL web site. It is where you go to download REBOL version 2, which is the lastest stable release. Development of REBOL stalled out in 2012 or so, and then version 3 was made open-source. Development on that seems to be stalled as well, although a couple other companies seem to have their own versions. That is good and bad. Version 2 is not getting "updated" which could be bad, but it works as it is and is a nice stable target for programming, which is good.
http://www.rebol.com/docs/docs.html	This page on rebol.com is a list of the official documentation for version 2. If you are learning REBOL, version 2 is the place to start, and this is where to find documentation.
http://www.rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore.html	REBOL is "packaged" into a couple main parts. One of those is the "Core" which is the non-GUI part that was designed to run on every computer known to man. The Core is the main part of the language and this document explains it, and eventually you are going to have to hack your way through this document. You will note that the version on the top of this document is not version 2.8 which is the lastest and final version. One of the problems with REBOL is that the development of its documentation stopped a bit before the development of the language stopped.
http://www.rebol.com/docs/dictionary.html	This document is a list of all the functions in REBOL. You may think of it as all the REBOL commands, although REBOL does not quite use that mental model. But it will do initially. This is about as good as it gets for a complete reference manual of the REBOL language. You can use the "help" function of the REBOL command prompt for the latest information, which sometimes does differ from this manual, although usually not, or not by much.
http://re-bol.com/rebol_quick_start.html	Some of these languages that "live" on the internet have a "community," which is a bunch of people who know stuff and are willing to share the information. One of the REBOL community members has made some extensive documentation. This is his beginner guide. It gives some reference information plus lots of examples that he explains.
http://business-programming.com/business_programming.html	This is more documentation by the auther of the previous document. It is more explanation, and more code. If you can get through all this, you will know REBOL.
http://rebolforum.com/index.cgi	If you are going to write REBOL programs, eventually you will need help with something. The author of the above two documents also maintains this site for asking question. As of 2017, a question posted here gets answered in about a day, sometimes faster. On the front page of this site you will see, at the top, links to other documentation he has written, including links to the documents mentioned above.
http://www.rebol.com/docs/easy-vid.html	Let's be realistic, is almost certain that you are going to want to write programs that show stuff on the screen. REBOL can do that. This is a good place to start to find out generally how to do that.
http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-guide.html	After you have read the above introductory document, read this one for more details about how to write graphical interfaces using the features built into REBOL.
http://www.cobolrebol.com/pages/documentation/VIDforCOBOL.html	Depending on your background, you could find the previous two documents on GUI programming a bit hard to follow. Some people, because of background, are used to a reference manual format for documentation and are a bit lost with a tutorial format and a specific question to ask. This document is a repackaging of existing VID documentation, along with some examples, that provides a sort of VID reference manual. As explained in the document, it might not be the complete story of VID, but, everything in it has been tested and works. It is complete enough so that you could pretend that it is a complete manual and write you programs using the features explained in the document.
http://rebol.org/	The above site seems to have been planned as a resource for the world of REBOL programmers. That seems to have died off, but the site still has a script library of over a thousand sample programs. It is a fun place to look around, and seems to show the REBOL as she should be written. It also is a source of ideas.
http://www.rebol.com/cgi-bin/blog.r?index=0/	In the fall of 2004 the author of REBOL started a blog. In the spring of 2017 the link to it disappeared from the REBOL site. The above link points to the the index of articles, and was working as of June of 2017. The blog is useful, to me, because it contains a few articles about REBOL philosophy, and other miscellaneous useful information that don't require programming knowlege to understand. Other articles about REBOL development or more technical details are less useful.
http://personal-programming.com/personal-programming.html	This is a bunch of scripts from the author of the rebol forum noted above. They are very dense, but also very short. At first glance, they don't strike a person as beginner-level, but because they are so short it is not impossible to hack one's way through them and understand them. Once you understand them, you have an understanding of, shall we say, "the REBOL as she should be written."