Appendix A. Getting help

While reading this book, you may run into cases where some concepts might be tough to understand, one of the examples doesn’t work, or you have trouble installing something like the Nim compiler on your machine.

The Nim community, which includes me, is available to help with such issues. This appendix describes different ways that you can get in touch with people who will be happy to help.

A.1. Real-time communication

The fastest way to get help is via one of the two real-time communication applications used by Nim programmers: IRC and Gitter. At the time of writing, there are more than 100 users in both Nim’s IRC channel and Gitter room.

The messages are relayed between IRC and Gitter, so speaking in one will send an equivalent message to the other. This means you can speak with the same set of people regardless of whether you’re using IRC or Gitter.

Gitter is far more approachable, so I suggest using it, especially if you’re not already familiar with IRC. You can find it here: https://gitter.im/nim-lang/Nim.

IRC can also be accessed via the web, or you can use one of the many available IRC clients, such as HexChat. The #nim IRC channel is hosted on freenode and can be accessed using the web chat client available here: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=nim.

Feel free to join and ask whatever questions you might have. In some cases, you might not hear from anyone for a while, so please be patient. If you need to leave but want to come back later to see if your question was answered, you can look at the messages written in the channel in Gitter and also in our IRC logs, located here: http://irclogs.nim-lang.org/.

A.2. Forum

There are two forums that you can use to get help. The first is the Nim forum, available at http://forum.nim-lang.org/. The second is the Manning forum for this book, available at https://forums.manning.com/forums/nim-in-action.

For questions relating to this book, feel free to use either forum. For more-general Nim questions, please use the Nim forum.

A.3. Other communication methods

For other ways to get in touch with the Nim community, take a look at the community page on the Nim website: http://nim-lang.org/community.html.