Learning Red - A guide to learn Red programming (with Screencasts)
I've started writing a guide that teaches you Red programming and can also be used as a reference to look up specific concepts. I plan to add screencast to every section in the document so that you can see a concept in action if you don't understand it from the text, there are already four of these short screencasts. They are short and unedited because I will recreate them whenever I update the text, this way I can very quickly redo the videos when needed.
You can check it out here: http://crypticwyrm.neocities.org/learningred/
There is already a lot of content there, but I am still heavily working on it so there will be updates to the document every day or two over the next few weeks. I plan to keep updating the document for a long time to turn it into the best learning resource for the language, both for complete beginners and people already familiar with the language since I will also cover very specific topics that are hard to figure out on your own, like how to make a window resizable.
I've written about Red here quite a few times now, it's one of my favorite programming languages and has gained quite a bit of popularity in the crypto community since the Red team is working on adding support for writing smart contracts in Red and has done a remarkably succesful ICO (it was sold out after a few days). Even Google seems to be very interested in it.
Most of the learning resources available online are for Red's predecessor, Rebol and while I used both languages on and off for many years I've never took the time to become an expert in either of the languages because I never had the chance to use them on a big project. So I'm writing this document to get a deeper understanding of Red and to add a new learning resource to the so far small pool.
I also cover Rebol in the document. The languages are about 90% the same, so it makes sense, because then you can also make use of the tons of learning resources available for Rebol. While Red is still in development and lacks some features, there might even still be a case where you'd prefer to use Rebol over Red.
If you don't know Red at all, watch this gif I created a while ago:
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Red lets you write fully native GUI applications so easily that it feels like using magic. Red can be used to write anything from device drivers all the way up to GUI apps, it's a full stack language, so you can use it to replace both a low level language like C and a high level language like Python.
It's especially great to create domain specific languages which makes programming a lot easier and therefore less error prone, because it comes with a DSL called PARSE which replaces regular expressions and is about a thousand times more powerful. You can see one of those DSLs created with PARSE in action in the GIF, which shows VID, the Visual Interface Dialect (Rebol and Red call DSLs dialects).
You can download Red and find out more about it here.