“While working on the Leap exercise for the MIPS track today, it took me a while to scour the internet for help on learning what operations exist etc. I was kind of expecting to find some information regarding this on Exercism but I couldn’t find anything. However, just now (a few hours later) I stumbled upon the track specific docs via the “contribute → docs” in the header. I am not sure if that’s the best place for these track-specific docs should be hiding. I feel like it would be a good idea to place a link to these docs for each track (when available) on the track’s homepage. Or a different, easier to find way to get there than currently”
To summarize, when learning a new language, I think it should be easier to find relevant documentation provided by Exercism, as it’s now pretty hard to find (in my opinion). Following up on a discussion with @iHiD on Discord (see the thread), perhaps it is a good idea to involve others in deciding if it’s worth looking into and if there are any other great ideas on how to tackle this.
The top menu is not the only way to get to the track documentation. There is the track homepage (right sidebar):
There is the “…” menu on every track page:
And on each and every exercise page there is this link in the left sidebar:
I also expected it to be on the “About [languange]” page, but there it is not.
In addition, each track may place useful links per exercise onto the Hints page or onto the instructions page if that does not reveal too much about the solution. But this depends on the track and exercise.
My conclusion: There is lots of places to find a way to the track docs. But it is not very clear, that one can find general help on learning the language there. Maybe adding the links from the track homepage to “About [language]” on a prominent place would help most.
The About page is intended to be a short high-level introduction to the language since it’s the first thing not-enrolled students see. I’d be reluctant to have learning resources content duplicated here since those should go on the existing learning resources page. Once a student enrolled, the About page is still available but in a different location from the other track-specific docs such as installing the offline tooling and running tests so I’d want to funnel students towards where those docs also are.
