I am clueless, Doryen library..

[Omnivorous]

Does anyone have any experience with this? It looks pretty impressive and seems very easy to use for roguelikes, especially with C++.

Anyone who has any experience with it?

[purestrain]

No programming experience; read some parts of the source and disliked it.

[Scautura]

I have intermediate experience - I've used both the C++ version, and the Python version, and it's fairly intuitive.

jice is working on 1.5 at the moment, and 1.4.2 just got released (updates and bugfixes) so give it a go.

[Omnivorous]

But how does it actually work? Is a "library" like something that someone have spent time coding in the original programming language (for example C++) and then put together as a 'library' which should contain the most used stuff you'll need, easiy accessible through certain variables and commands?

[Fenrir]

So you don't know how libraries in general work? I'm far from an expert, but I'm fairly certain you just described it accurately: bits of code somebody wrapped up for you to use. It's probably more involved than that, though.

Have you read the documentation yet?

[Scautura]

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head.

You already use libraries in coding if you're working in any reasonable language. In C/C++, as soon as you #include anything, that's a library. In Python, as soon as you import anything, that's a library. If you code, you've probably written your own library, although possibly nothing as grand as, say, TDL or Boost. It's just another way of defining a group of commonly used functions and variables.

Effectively, a library is a set of related, commonly used code that prevents you having to write similar code from scratch (in some cases, this could take weeks, months, or even years to do) and allows you to get on with the nitty gritty of coding.