About More SageMath thematic tutorials

This repository is meant as a place to collectively share and evolve thematic tutorials for the SageMath with the aim to merge the mature ones into Sage's official thematic tutorials.

Rationale

Over the years, many of us have grown personal collections of tutorials written at the occasion of various events (courses, Sage Days, ...). We hope that putting them together will foster reuse, collective writing, cross references, cross-reviews, and maturation in general.

We use ReST + Sphinx as authoring format, following Sage's documentation conventions. Here is our rationale:

• Can be tested, version controlled, ...;
• Can be converted to many formats: ipynb, web page, pdf, ...;
• Consistency with Sage's documentation and documentation tools;
• Enable powerful cross linking; in particular crosslinks to the Python and Sage documentation are fully supported;
• Paves the way for integration into the Sage.

Contributing

Contributions of all kinds are most welcome! If you spot a typo while reading the documents on ReadTheDocs please follow "Edit on GitHub" -> "Edit this file" and submit your change (this requires a GitHub account).

For larger changes, pull requests are very welcome. For regular contributions, ask e.g. @nthiery for direct access to the project's repository.

Recommendations

• Break the tutorials in small units (10-20 minutes), each in its separate file.

• Specify at the beginning of the unit its aim: what the reader can expect to learn.

• Write a summary at the end of what was learned, with links to related or followup tutorials: 'too learn more about xxx, you may want to read yyy'.

• Include lots of cross links.

• Include lots of exercises.

• Include corrections for the exercises, possibly in a separate file. Alternatively, we could use the ifconfig sphinx extension.

• Whenever relevant: explain the math behind. Think you are writing a math book, illustrated with Sage.

• If there is a natural location for the unit in the Sage sources (e.g. a tutorial about rings in Sage could go in sage.rings.tutorial) plan to put it there, in a python file sage/rings/tutorial.py. This way, Once integrated into Sage, it will be accessible to the user with sage.rings.tutorial?.

  To avoid naming conflicts, the file in this repository should actually be mocksage/rings/tutorial.py.

• Units that are tied to a given event (talk, workshop, course) should be seen as mostly owned by their main author(s). Typo fixes are very welcome, but refrain from other modifications.

  All other units are joint property. Any refactoring is welcome as long as the original aim is maintained.

• Test the examples in the documents; e.g.:

  sage -t foo.rst
  

Usage

A copy of the html outputs is built and hosted on ReadTheDocs It's automatically updated each time commits are pushed on the repository. This takes a couple minutes. In case some configuration needs to be tweaked, the ReadTheDoc's project is currently owned by @nthiery.

To compile the documents locally:

git clone https://github.com/sagemath/more-sagemath-tutorials.git
cd more-sagemath-tutorials
pip install --user -e .            # Alternative: python setup.py install
make html

A few files are automatically generated. When adding/removing a document one need to regenerate them:

make distclean
make html

For now those files are version controlled in the git repository. So make a commit.