Breadth or Depth?

Princeton’s soundlab has a couple of really interesting audio hacking tools that we’ll get to soon. But I was struck by something on the docs page for Tapestrea. Notice the part that says: online user guide (pick one): breadth-first | depth-first. What a novel idea!

Unfortunately, these two links each lead to a bland table of contents. Both have virtually the same links jumbled in order. Still: branching in education is plain old Tim Toady.

I guess my expectation was that the breadth-first link would have a cheater’s diagram that sums everything up, sort of like the first page of an owner’s manual, with arrows and what’s what. Or those peel-away diagrams of the human body that come in really expensive encyclopedias. An expanded version of the Tapestrea diagram (pictured here) from the home page.

The depth-first link could take you straight to the code. Or some hands-on tutorial. Don’t explain anything, just get me INTO IT!! And then, both depth and breadth would converge into a longer walkthrough.

You know what? I really like it when something fails to meet my expectations! It wakes me up to what things could be in store for the future, you know??