There is an illustrated tutorial by me on Csounds.com, _A Csound Tutorial_, which is also distributed with the Windows installers, and which covers the command line, csound5gui, and basic scripting.

A number of users have said they found this helpful.

Regards,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
>From: Anthony Kozar 
>Sent: Mar 24, 2008 3:35 PM
>To: "csound@lists.bath.ac.uk" 
>Subject: [Csnd] Re: Csound Music Archive
>
>Wow!  I am amazed at the amount of overlapping interest in Csound and
>interactive fiction.  I too have been interested in IF for a few years and I
>have played around with the Inform compiler.
>
>I don't know what else to say about making Csound easier to learn.  The
>Reference Manual is exactly that:  a reference.  I will point out that Barry
>Vercoe's Csound tutorial and Dr. B's Toots used to be distributed as part of
>the manual.  If we added a similar gentle introduction of significant length
>to the Csound Ref. Man. maybe that would help.  (Maybe it wouldn't *shrug*
>-- Csound is tough :| ).
>
>The Csound developers are mostly professional teachers and/or programmers.
>And as someone who has tried, I will say that writing truly accessible,
>clear, thorough but concise documentation is a lot of work!!  The first few
>chapters of the Csound book are among the best material in this vein, I
>think.
>
>Having a centralized place for Csound music is a good idea.  But some things
>that I like about having my music on my own site are being able to count
>downloads/listens and to precisely control the presentation of "program
>notes" and license info.  (Some of my music is on ruccas.org too which is
>flexible enough for my needs.  BTW, I think that sounding like "being
>trapped inside a robot cow" is part of the ruccas credo ;)
>
>Regarding the differences between IF tools and Csound tools, there really
>are almost as many different ways and reasons to use Csound as there are
>users.  I am not sure, but I suspect IF is a "narrower" art form from this
>perspective.  Four major ways of using Csound come to mind:  (1) as a
>real-time performance instrument, (2) as a sample manipulator, (3) as a
>"traditional" compositional tool (i.e. write a fixed score and "perform"
>it), and (4) as an algorithmic compositional tool.
>
>Which Csound front end you use and how much you have to deal with the
>orchestra and score languages in their raw text form is largely dependent on
>how you are using Csound.  Here are some highly personal opinions that do
>not diminish the value of other tools and methods.  For (2), I think that
>Cecilia is a wonderful Csound front end.  For (3), I think that blue is the
>best tool I've ever seen.  For (4), using the programming language of your
>choice with an appropriate computer music library may be best (eg. OMDE or
>athenaCL for Python, Common Music for Lisp) but blue and other standalone
>tools such as CMask are also useful -- this is a highly personal area.  For
>(1),  I am still not convinced that Csound is the "best" choice.  Several
>people have written successful Csound RT front ends for their personal use
>but that is not a course of action for everyone.  I really don't know enough
>about RT performance to judge, but I suspect there are good reasons so many
>people are using other software entirely (such as PD or Max).
>
>And this brings me to my final point:  maybe Csound isn't for everyone.  We
>spend a lot of time discussing ways to bring more people into our community
>or at least not to alienate people who are curious about Csound.  But
>perhaps Csound is not a good replacement for all users of Cubase, Logic,
>Midi studios, Max, PD, or even Supercollider.  Maybe there are even some
>aspects of Csound that will always seem alienating or uninteresting to some
>musicians no matter how we dress it up or how great the tutorials are.
>
>And maybe that's OK.
>
>Anthony Kozar
>mailing-lists-1001 AT anthonykozar DOT net
>http://anthonykozar.net/
>
>
>Michael Bechard wrote on 3/24/08 9:56 AM:
>
>> As a fellow one-time IF'er, I have to agree about the community. Very strong
>> community, great tools, good documentation.
>> 
>> CSound has a long way to go to get to that level of friendliness and
>> centralization. [...] The manual that comes with CSound doesn't have any
>> tutorials, something which the manual for Inform (IF language) does.  Even
>> if one does happen to find a tutorial, it will involve text-editors and
>> command-line work.  Most people like GUIs, easy-to-use interfaces.  Getting
>> introduced to CSound in this manner, while maybe strong academically
>> speaking, will not engender many new, non-student types. I think there are
>> other ways to introduce people to CSound that aren't as archaic but will
>> teach one the fundamentals nonetheless.
>> 
>> Michael Bechard
>> 
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Jim Aikin 
>> To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
>> Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2008 9:21:23 PM
>> Subject: [Csnd] Re: Csound Music Archive
>
>> Thanks for the tip. Right now I'm being confronted by a randomly chosen
>> piece from ruccas. I won't mention the name of the piece or the
>> composer, but it's like being trapped inside a robot cow. And not in a
>> good way. But that gets us into the aesthetic questions, which would
>> belong in a different thread.
>
>> I thought to bring up the idea of a Csound music repository because I'm
>> also involved from time to time in another digital art form that uses
>> highly sophisticated (and free) software tools -- interactive fiction.
>
>> I don't mind programming. It's kind of fun. For me the discouraging
>> thing about Csound is having to produce an event list in Excel. That
>> gets laborious very quickly. I've downloaded and installed blue, which I
>> think might be what I need, but to be honest I haven't yet been able to
>> come to grips with the manual, which seems to start in the middle and
>> assume I know a lot of stuff that I don't in fact know.
>> 
>> Again, the contrast with the interactive fiction tools is striking.
>> Writing IF is programming, no two ways about it. But the two leading
>> languages both have very slick IDEs and profuse documentation. If Csound
>> had anything like that -- wow!
>
>
>
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