This article makes a ton of good points, but misses typesetting. A lot of the books he cites got typeset with troff. Certainly all of Kernighan's books, and all of Stevn's books, got typeset using troff.<p>It's not that troff is so great at user input (it's not, it's frighteningly difficult) but that the output is so good. I know that Stevens tweaked the troff to get good output, too. No orphans, widows or rivers for him.<p>Books typeset using "Word" are typically, though not always, not good books. Word's output is usually a little goofy. Word also seems to tempt people into doing stupid things, too. Maybe Word is too easy, and authors end up writing too much, but something causes Word-set books to be a bit worse in general than other typesetting-method-books.
This is actually quite timely advice, as I'm co-authoring a book for O'Reilly right now. I do question one of the points made about book length, though - do people really prefer smaller books? This is purely based on my perspective (so should be taken with a grain of salt) but I assumed that people prefer larger volumes because it gives them the warm fuzzy feeling (tm) that they're going to find whatever they need inside. (We are going with a small-ish book, however.)<p>Any thoughts? Thanks guys!
Great article. I particularly like the advice to keep the length of the book short. However, what do you do when you can't, break it into separate Volumes like Knuth's, TAoCP?
While short snippets of code to illustrate a point are useful, I find the reams of pages devoted to entire sample programs pointless. When does anyone have the time or incliniation to go the an associated website download and compile code, whilst reading a book?<p>I also see little point in reading a book on a subject until you've at least played with the technology yourself.