Introduction for New Users

SNOMAN comes with two complete manuals and well over 100 minor documents. The problem often faced by a user is not that the information they want does not exist, but they don't know where to look! The manuals focus on specific subjects but users want to focus on specific goals. To help bridge this gap, this SNOMAN Companion has been provided.

This companion is divided into the following sections:-

Introduction for New Users

Your are reading it!

Goals

This approaches the documentation from the perspective of a user who wants to achieve a specific goal. It tells them what prequisite goals they need to achieve before starting a task and suggests future goals. So it can be used to map out learning paths. For the most part the goals tell the user to read specific parts of the User and Programmer manuals. In an ideal world, these would link directly to HTML versions of the manuals. Sadly though these don't yet exist, so the links refer to named sections within them. Most of this companion assumes that you have already got the documentation and code. If this is not the case the you need to Install SNOMAN

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

Some questions come up time after time. As they do, we will try to update this section so that others can benefit for the experience.

Glossary

This section provides fairly concise definitions of technical terms and phrases that can be found in the documentation.

Event Data Structure

This provides a complete reference to the permanent data structure describing a single event.

Titles banks

This provides a complete reference to the permanent data structures that describe the detector and control the software.

ID Codes

This provides a complete reference to the codes are used in event and titles data structures.

Software Structure

This section leads to a series of Software Unit (SU) structure diagrams that show:-

How the code is structured.
What an individual routine does.
How it fits into the structure.

ZEBRA: A Beginner's Guide + Reference

ZEBRA is somewhat of a culture shock if you have never used a FORTRAN memory manger before. This beginner's guide tries to soften the blow! It also contains a reference section.

N-tuple DQFs

This section gives describes all the n-tuple Derived Quantity Functions (DQFs)

Commands and Command Files

This section gives help for those coding SNOMAN symbolic commands and also lists existing command files.

Debugging

This section gives help for those debugging interactively or as a post mortem.

HTML: A Beginner's Guide

HypText Mark up Language (HTML) is the source language of the companion. This beginner's guide offers just enough information to allow the user to update it.

Installation

This just contains a few notes on how to install the companion.

Release notes

This contains references to release notes and bug fixes.