A howto comes closest. A bunch of howtos would sometimes be combined into a cyclopedia. (see http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/The_Household_Cyclopedia_of_Gene… -- I'd love to see more of this on wikisource for ready reference throughout the projects. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Household_Cyclopedia_1881.djvu ) And some textbooks are layered and flexible enough to be good at this bootstrapping as well. Note that WikiHow hasn't managed to be this sort of resource, and each entry is much more standalone. And WP likewise tends to avoid this sort of straight bootstrapping, offering narrative and history and context instead.* But to traverse this sort of work would involve following links to processes and subprocesses until you got all the way down to the tools, skills, and rsources you have available. So it is much better suited to hypertext than a linear book, and it's not so surprising that it hasn't emerged as its own named work-type before. A narrowly limited version of this is sometimes devised to quickly get from one concept to another. A stripped-down version might be a sequence of lemmas that proves some major theorem [it's less convincing and empowering when you magically are told what steps will lead to an understanding; not clear how to prove something similar]. An unrealistic one is 'technology trees' in civilisation games. The canonical bootstrapping problem is "I want to do complicated thing A, and have {B}. what's a reasonably short Tool/Training/Concept progression that will get me there, and what else will that enable me to do?" To make a good bootstrapping work, you don't need to cover every possible T/T/C tree, but enough commonly shared ones to make a decent stab at it. Exs: You want to teach a bright 8-yr old fourier analysis. The river keeps flooding, and needs to be stabilized. We need to bridge a ravine between two wooded hills. I have an acre of rocky scrub to cultivate to feed a community of 40. They want to make peace with a community that speaks a different language. SJ * Of course this could be boiled down to "part of a good comprehensive article on Wikipedia" in the same way that all wikiprojects could be merged into WP if one were so inclined... On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 4:35 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Andrew Gray wrote: Son, flint is easy to knap, but if you want to do serious hunting, you want to go with something more durable. Like a canoe shape axe of granite. Copper is easy. Try tin. Thataway you can make bronze. Mucho hard, bronze, even if not quite iron or steel. If copper is gold "thrice removed", tin is the philosphers stone thrice removed. I think this is the lesson that will have brought us to lesson number one, if there ever will be one. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen