Warning
We are in the process of converting over to a new documentation publishing system. Some documents are not entirely correct yet. We’ve retained links to the ‘Old HTML’ where relevant. These will be going away in the near future.
Just getting started with Open Dylan? We recommend that you read the Introduction to Dylan to get a feel for the language. After that, you can broaden your knowledge with the Dylan Programming book.
An Introduction to Dylan [pdf] [epub]
This tutorial is written primarily for those with solid programming experience in C++ or another object-oriented, static language. It provides a gentler introduction to Dylan than does the Dylan Reference Manual (DRM).
A good, book length Dylan tutorial by several Harlequin employees.
Getting Started with Open Dylan [pdf] [epub] [old HTML]
Describes Open Dylan’s development environment. The first two chapters are useful on any platform, whereas the remaining chapters document the Open Dylan IDE on Windows.
Building Applications Using DUIM [pdf] [epub] [old HTML]
Describes how to use DUIM (Dylan User Interface Manager), the portable window programming toolkit. This is only useful if you are using Open Dylan on Windows.
Quick one-page sheets for common tasks.
A cheat sheet to get you started with the basics of Dylan syntax.
Featured articles and blog postings.
Dylan Macro System by Dustin Voss.
This article holds hard-won knowledge about how the Dylan macro system works and how to work around some of the gotchas that may catch a macro writer.
Procedural Dylan by Paul Haahr.
This essay explores Dylan from the perspective of a programmer used to traditional procedural languages, such as Pascal or C.
Development inside emacs using DIME
An exciting look at using DIME and emacs for Dylan development.
These are some lengthier reference materials. While they make for dry reading, they're full of invaluable information!
Dylan Reference Manual (Errata)
The official definition of the Dylan language and standard library.
Dylan Library Reference [pdf] [epub]
Describes the Open Dylan implementation of the Dylan language, a core set of Dylan libraries, and a library interchange mechanism. The core libraries provide many language extensions, a threads interface, and object finalization, printing and output formatting modules, a streams module, a sockets module, and modules providing an interface to operating system features such as the file system, time and date information, the host machine environment, as well as a foreign function interface and some low-level access to the Microsoft Win32 API.
Describes the libraries forming DUIM (Dylan User Interface Manager), the portable window programming toolkit. It complements Building Applications Using DUIM.
Notes and materials useful to those working on Open Dylan itself or those who have an interest in the low level details.
Open Dylan Hacker’s Guide [pdf] [epub]
A work in progress to help out people who are hacking on Open Dylan itself.
Dylan Style Guide [pdf] [epub]
Notes and thoughts on how to format your Dylan code. This is the style guide that we aspire to adhere to in the Open Dylan sources.
A series of proposals for improvements to the Open Dylan implementation and related libraries.
This is old documentation that we don't plan to bring forward. Let us know if there's interest in this material.
Developing Component Software with CORBA
A tutorial and reference for CORBA interoperability using the Open Dylan ORB.
OLE, COM, ActiveX and DBMS library reference
Describes high and low level interfaces to COM, OLE, and ActiveX component technology, and generic DBMS support, through SQL with an ODBC backend.
