Exploring Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) - Part 5: Clojure Documentation using FreeMind
Friday, October 31, 2008
Unlike many programmers, I've always enjoyed reading programming
documentation. Rich Hickey has done a great job documenting
Clojure; however, I find the current documentation site navigation scheme less
than optimal. On most pages, there is a Table of Contents; however,
it's hard to get a good overall feel for what is where; and, it's also
not that easy to
jump to different sections in different pages. The other day, I was
scanning through the
Files section of the Clojure Google Group and came across a
mind map image of
The Reader in Clojure. It looked pretty neat and I
thought that it would be really cool if all of the Clojure documentation
was available (hyperlinked) as a mind map. One thing lead to another,
and, in the end, I knocked up a mind map of all the Clojure
documentation using a combination of
FreeMind, some Emacs keyboard macros, and some cut-and-paste. I
should have used Clojure to do it programmatically, but I didn't think of
that until I was already most of the way there! The following image
shows what it looks like - if you click on the image, you'll be taken
to an interactive mind map page (you'll need to have Java enabled in your
browser for this to work) in which you can expand/contract nodes and
click through to specific Clojure documentation pages (in separate tabs). Enjoy!
