I have a tentative draft of the first 4 chapters of the long-rumoured book that is 48 pages long.
This is not another dull repackaging of the official ROS 2 documentation, at least I hope it’s not. It doesn’t talk about all the command options for a command, it doesn’t tell you all the functions in an API, it explains a huge part of ROS using gradual disclosure. It takes you step by step, if you want to take the slow, more complete path, and points you to shortcuts by referring you to shiny objects nearby, similar to the way the Wiki works. Its primary purpose is to fill in a lot of gaps in the documentation and also explain how to configure and tune the important modules using expertise I got from actually reading the source code and the research papers that described the algorithms used in the code.
It is intended to solve two problems:
- How you get people to get over the huge learning cliff of ROS 2 without their eyes glazing over or losing their will to (live? no) keep reading on.
- How do I find a solution to my robot’s problem, even if I don’t know how to talk about it?
I’m just looking for a handful of people that want to look at it and tell me how you like the tone, the approach, the attempt to keep the user engaged, the effectiveness of gradual disclosure and so forth.
If interested, send me a private message to either
mwi...@gmail.com (as used in this e-mail) or to
mi...@wimblerobotics.com. The PDF is about a half megabyte in size. I would expect, of course, that you don’t share the document or use it to write your own book. No contracts, no NDAs, just an expectation of people acting honorably. Don’t apply if you don’t think you’ll actually give me feedback.