ROOT Manual's week

(11 October 2021)

ROOT has now a brand new Manual, bringing “how do you read data with ROOT” and similar core aspects into contemporary ROOT. Much of the manual has been rethought and simplified, we hope and expect that concepts and interfaces are now easier to understand!

To achieve this, all the ROOT team was involved in a big update of the Manual and Reference Guide during one full week.

Previously, the ROOT documentation was spread over three different main manuals:

The Reference Guide and the Manual are the current valid sources of documentation. The Manual acts as a “User’s Guide” helping users to find their way into the huge amount of documentation provided in the Reference Guide.

The Old User’s Guide was outdated and not updated but nevertheless contained some valuable information we did not want to lose. It was more a “Long Write-Up” like the following example:

The first task of the week was to make sure the Manual’s table of content was complete: by groups of experts, we updated the existing chapters (Histograms, Graphs, Trees …) and create the new needed ones (JSROOT, ROOT I/O…) which also led to updates in the Reference Guide.

We also moved everything still valuable in the Old User’s Guide to the relevant places, updating the Manual or the Reference Guide. In the end (and after another, final round at the end of the year) we will drop completely the Old User’s Guide and instead have an accurate and complete Manual.

This new Manual allows you to contribute - for instance by letting us know when something is hard to understand (by opening an issue) or even by fixing it yourself: see the GitHub octocat at the bottom right corner of each page!

We hope you’ll enjoy the new manual, and that it’s useful for today’s new grad students!