Before You Begin

Currently this users guide is at a very early stage and covers only a small fraction of the Facets package. The reader is therefore advised to treat this document as providing only a taste of things to come.

The author debated whether to start with a full table of contents covering all topics that will be in the final version of this document and eventually decided against it for several reasons:

• As a user, it can be very frustrating to browse through a large table of contents and select a topic of interest only to find that the section has not been written yet. And then repeat the process over and over again, each time with the same result.
• As an author, it can be very daunting to look at a large table of contents and think about all the work that lies ahead. Sometimes the tendency is to pick simple topics that can be written quickly in order to provide an immediate sense of accomplishment. The problem is that those topics may not be the ones a new user will want to see first.

As a result, I have outlined only a very minimal, introductory set of topics to cover what I feel will be of most use to a new user. My plan is to complete these initial topics and then expand the outline with the next most important set of topics, and so on, until the guide is complete. Hopefully, users will also help with this process, as discussed in the section on Demand Driven Documentation.

So, if you are reading this early draft of the users guide and come across an unwritten section, you can take some comfort in knowing that it will probably be written Real Soon Now. And if you come up with a topic not yet outlined, please feel free to request it be added.

Once the users guide reaches a certain critical mass of information, this section will be removed, superceded by the contents of the Documentation To Do List section., which will contain the definitive list of what topics still remain to be written.