I’m just wondering why it is that the I7 Designer’s Manual that you can find on the web isn’t listed here? In fact it doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere on the internet. Is it just a rough draft?
…aaand upon taking a closer look at it I see it’s basically the standard I7 documentation prettied up and with a few chapters switched around. Ignore me then
The manual in that nice format would certainly have deserved a separate mention, if it were not that is in too many respects out of date (it’s for an Inform 7 version from 2006).
Jeff Nyman once started a series of Inform 7 tutorials—The Well-Versed Informer—that are not at all bad.
The three existing parts of this series, “The Well-Versed Informer”, “Inform Foundations“, and “Descriptions and Locale”, can all be downloaded in PDF format from Zurlocker’s IF-site “Z-Machine Matter”: http://www.z-machine-matter.com/2010/11/jeff-nyman-tutorials.html
I have to say, I started with the regular Inform 7 manual, and while it is excellent, I’d still be sitting here shaking my head if not for recipe manual. Using both has been perfect. As a traditional PHP programmer, I thought I’d just need Writing with Inform, but found myself feeling really lost with the levels of abstraction at times.
Was updated to point to 6L38-compatible extensions; github.com/i7/extensions has most of them it appears
Ideally had a page for each extension that in turn has links to that extension’s version history, since there will still be reason for pre-6L02 extensions, for legacy reasons.
As a fledgling author trying to jump into the I7 6L38 wagon, I heartily second these suggestions. Otherwise, I7 is very difficult to work with as it stands.
I would say, also a bit of a newbie, that I7 is a very powerful tool that presents as a very simple thing. It’s a bit like “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang*” - it’s a simple boring old car for going down the shops with and pootling around. Then you turn this, twiddle that, suddenly the whole thing takes off and flies you to some bizarre country you never heard of.
of course, if you don’t twiddle those knobs right or your not yet a very good pilot, the whole thing could get quite messy.
Luckily this board is a handy resource for fledgling aeronauts. But there’s no substitute for jumping off and flapping your arms
*I just watched Joanna Lumley’s biography of Ian Fleming, which had his original drawings of CCBB