Show HN: Algebra.js – Build, display, and solve algebraic equations

Re:Show HN: Algebra.js – Build, display, and solve algebraic... by kevin on Friday August 14, 2015 @04:50PM (#10062843)

This is so well done! There are so many little touches here that delights me like the keyboard shortcuts for jumping right in and the LaTeX support. Even though this started off as a learning project for you, know that this is probably better than 95% of the API documentation I read from more professional development teams.

Jason Long's Cayman Theme was unfamiliar to me until I saw your citation. Kudos to your good taste.

Documentation is pretty good. It probably skews more towards developers with experience using other libraries, but I think that's fine for a first version. If you want to kick it up some more, I'd love to see more practical examples that might inspire me to use it out in the wild. Also, it took me awhile to figure out what to do with the keyboard shortcut. Something more explicit or even a small screencast would be nice.

I see that you also work on the RNeo4j library, which looks super cool. Queueing that up in the future to play with...since R is a much better place for me to feed that graphing library data. Thank you so much for sharing this!

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Re:Show HN: Algebra.js – Build, display, and solve algebraic... by nicolewhite on Friday August 14, 2015 @06:04PM (#10063265)

Thank you for the kind words! I appreciate it. I agree that I should add a bit more instruction for opening up the JS console in Chrome or FF. I'll also add a use case section to show some practical examples.

Glad to hear you're interested in RNeo4j; let me know what you think.

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Re:Show HN: Algebra.js – Build, display, and solve algebraic... by heatish on Friday August 14, 2015 @08:17PM (#10063755)

For the less dev tools savvy, you could leave those top instructions on solving 2x - 3 = 4 in a console.log in your code. So once they get dev tools open they see some more instructions for the next step.

  console.log("Type the following in this order pressing enter each time you see a semi-colon: \n var expr = new Expression('x'); \n expr = expr.subtract(3); \n expr = expr.add('x'); \n console.log(expr.toString()); \n var eq = new Equation(expr, 4); \n console.log(eq.toString()); var x = eq.solveFor('x'); \n console.log('x = '' + x.toString());");

Very cool project by the way.

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Re:Show HN: Algebra.js – Build, display, and solve algebraic... by nicolewhite on Friday August 14, 2015 @11:04PM (#10064156)

That's a very clever idea. Thanks.

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