The number of people interested in an offline indoctrination is very reduced. No publisher would like the math of such creation.

The idea of having the resources online is that any good platform must evolve. Buying something to be good for only a year (every Spring there's a new OS version out) is a waste of money. Specially because when webdeveloping an hands-on learning is more effective and the community is here to answer any doubts.

While I agree that the online help, documentation and tutorials may be lacking in some areas, why would you want to go backwards and create a hardcopy book?  Here's a great idea, create an online 'bible' in Outsystems!!  Maybe something along the line of an Outsystems Wiki that everyone could contribute to.

A lot of this type of information is in the forum but obviously has no organization of any kind.  My biggest challenge with the forums is that I do a search, find a relavent thread, read a bunch of posts and realize the information no longer applies because its for an old version of Outsystems.  Something like a Wiki could help to organize this knowledge.

Yes, a wiki would work just fine. Sometimes instructions written out are much easier to digest than watching youtube videos!

Hi Michael,

Have you tried Service Studio or LifeTime reference help?
When you search in the community, you can filter the results to only display information from the reference help.

Another useful trick is to press F1 in Service Studio to get contextual help. No, it won't take 30 minutes to load, like Visual Studio or Microsoft Office help :)

I took the original question to mean more about looking for how-to's, best practices, sample application patterns, etc. not the help functions.  While the help that is available using the F1 key is actually very good it's not really going to tell you (in most cases) why you would use a particular setting for a particular function in an application.

For example, if your search Static Entities in the help you get a page that describes all the attributes and what they do.  What it doesn't say, especially for someone new to designing a database driven system, is when you would choose to create this type of entity and why?  What are the advantages/disadvantages over a normal entity?  I would never suggest adding this type of information to the help as it would become huge but a 'bible' that could elaborate on the 'why would you use x' could be valuable to new developers.

I've thought quite a number of times about putting together something like the old Perl Cookbook, which was exactly what you are describing... a collection of "here is how you solve this common problem using OutSystems, why this approach is the best, do not do XYZ because of ABC, etc." It would be REALLY helpful for folks, especially if it took the best information from the forum and compiled it into a single resource.

I suspect that the creation/maintenance of it would need to be done primarily by OutSystems. That's a huge undertaking, and I suspect that without this being part of someone's day-to-day job, it will not get done.

J.Ja

yes, yes to how-to's, best practices, and sample applications. Yes, to a cookbook! Super powerful systems seem more difficult to "document" because they are more flexible with many approaches to accomplish the same thing.

A wiki would make more sense than a book.
This forum got a bit messy after so many versions. Some regular cleanups moving the best solutions to a wiki would be perfect.

Guys...something other than irritating, time-consuming, videos where I must watch and listen rather than cut to the chase and *do*. I want to read things like: "How to create record list", "How to bind to Listbox", "How to Add Item to Listbox". This seems pretty basic. Not finding these, but tons of architecture papers (yawn) or videos.

Could this help? Service Studio 8.0 Help

As I mentioned in my earlier post on this thread, using the F1 key brings up the Service Studio help that you mention and while that help does explain the feature, it never explains why you would use the feature.  That's where this bible or wiki or whatever could be valuable by taking experiences from real developers and have examples of why you would do things one way and not another. 

Unfortunately, as Justin mentions, this is a huge undertaking and would likely require assistance and funding from Outsystems so unfortunately it is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

While the videos are nice a Wiki would be a lot better, so +1 for the Wiki suggestion from me.

I don't think it really is that difficult, I would add some notes there everytime I solved something I thought someone else could have to deal with in the future.

Now I do think it would need to have some kind of Outsystems official envolvement or something like that or it might not stay alive for long...