Wednesday, March 19, 2003

To the book authors As I mentioned, I wrote a book for Wrox and I will tell you, I made a bunch of decisions that I would do differently.  So I would like to talk about techie books as a whole and hopefully provide guidance for the authors out there. Stop the super-sized madness.  I have books on my shelf that are 700+ pages.  I can guarantee you that the binding is still relatively fresh on them because there is just too much there.  I will never have the opportunity to scour the book and put it to good use.  These tend to be SDK docs turned into books.  Before the Wrox thing, I thought their handbook series was a great idea.  Basically, it was "we are going to take a specific topic - such as threading or class design - and have a small book that focuses around the specific topic and give you value-added information.  These were great because I could take one with me on vacation and it didn't weigh 50 pounds.  Don't rewrite the SDK.  It is interesting that writers will sometimes rewrite the SDK docs without adding anything to it.  I want books to talk about things I can't get for free from Microsoft!  There are so many great books to be written, we don't need yet another ASP.NET book, what we need is Building Portal Applications, Building Customer Service Applications, Best Practices for ASP.NET Site Management, etc.  At this point in the .NET book history, we should be close to done on any books that only describe the tools.  Show us how to build the deck, not how the band saw works. Pricing.  I know authors and publishers won't like this, but can we bring book prices down?  $50 books are way too expensive.  I know quite a few get their company to buy them, but for the average joe, $50 is just a lot of money.  I would like to figure out how that price can be lowered, maybe make them available in .DOC or .PDF formats to download for a smaller price.  I am sure someone already does this today. Think in the Whole.  Can we get back to the fundamentals of software development?  I speak with brand new users all the time and one of the problems they have with most books is that they are told how to do something but never why.  What about tradeoffs (such as Wizard-generated coding vs. manual coding)?  Also, give us your experience - I enjoy when an author discusses how the implemented something and it turned out wrong!  Then they show how they did it the right way.   I believe that the developer community as a whole is responsible for helping those who are new to our community.  Give them the guidance and experience you have to help them overcome challenges you may have already had to deal with.  Those are just the ones off the top of my head.  I could go on but there is work to do.  8:14:44 AM    comment []