Dyalog Primer - Introduction

The purpose of these pages is to offer a guided tour, or self-tuition guide, for people who have just installed Dyalog APL/W (Version 11 or higher) and want to begin using APL as a solutions tool for business, scientific or educational applications. It assumes no prior knowledge of APL - just that Dyalog APL is installed.

Note - as of April 2008 this represents a first cut for an APL Primer - which may be amended, augmented and updated as it is used - please send comments and suggestions.

Each chapter is divided into two main (parallel) sections.

An exploration session which invites the reader/participant to try a number of tasks
A discussion section which outlines the topic being covered and directs the reader/participant to further (external) material. Exercises are also included.

As a primer, the pages are just that. There is no pretence of being exhaustive - the goal is to give the reader/participant an exposure to APL, an insight into good practice, and the confidence to take their next step(s) indpendently.
Please bear in mind that in this first draft the goal is to establish material, presentation will be polished once this is achieved.
If you find any errors, or would like to suggest changes to the material please contact the author.
A couple of suggestions...

If you have previous programming experience, try to approach APL with an open mind - for reasons that will (well, they should) become apparent as you work through these pages it's not a good idea to learn APL by simple translation from other - different - programming languages.
As APL is indeed a language, it's a good idea to use the right terms in the right way. The Vocabulary page is there to help you achieve this.

There are other versions of APL besides Dyalog - much of the material in these pages is equally valid for APLX and APL2 - to name a couple. But there's no attempt here to warn when things get specific to Dyalog. APL has also spawned a number of variants (J and K are examples) which are sufficiently different (in detail) that they deserve (and have) their own primers.
These pages have not (yet) been subjected to the rigours of testing with a full variety of browsers and screen resolutions. For fullest compatibility I suggest Firefox and a screen resolution of at least 1280x1024.
The APL font used is APL385 Unicode (supplied within the Dyalog APL/W product). It should be possible to cut/paste between these pages and a Dyalog session, but for the full programming experience it's suggested the reader/participant types with their finger(s).
And remember - you only really learn anything by making mistakes - and recovering from them.