Amazon.com Review
With the new JavaHelp standard from Sun, Java programmers can now deliver online help that rivals traditional help systems on other platforms such as Windows. Aimed at Java developers and technical writers,
Creating Effective JavaHelp provides a very concise guide to creating help systems using this new standard.
Even before HTML was widely used, help systems provided hyperlinks and browsing capabilities. The book does a good job at orienting the reader to JavaHelp and how it relates to these earlier help systems. It also includes a short, useful section on project planning for online help. The text next shows how the JavaHelp standard uses XML to structure content layout (for such options as navigation and the table of contents; help content itself is organized into HTML pages). Creating Effective JavaHelp works through a sample help system from Sun and shows you how to create a simple, custom help system to illustrate these concepts.
For developers, the book ventures into a discussion of the JavaHelp APIs, which allow a program to call up context-sensitive help at run-time. Other sections show how to take advantage of more advanced help features, like using secondary windows to display content or using embedded help within custom applications. The book ends with reference material on relevant XML tags, plus the JavaHelp API itself.
Chances are JavaHelp won't change the way you create help systems. (As the book notes, third party tools will actually let you deploy help systems to JavaHelp automatically.) But this compact text points out the differences and advantages of JavaHelp for creating online help on the Java platform. Whether you are a technical writer, developer, or project manager, you'll want a copy of Creating Effective JavaHelp to see the future of online help for the next generation of Java applications. --Richard Dragan
Topics covered:
- Overview of the JavaHelp help system; JavaHelp versus other help systems; standalone, context-sensitive, and embedded help
- Deploying JavaHelp
- HelpSet basics
- Map and navigation files
- Project planning guide for creating help systems
- Help topics
- XML basics for HelpSet navigation and table of contents (TOC) files
- Popup and secondary windows
- Customizing stopwords
- Using the JavaHelp API: implementing context-sensitive and embedded help, third-party help authoring tools, reference for HelpSet, Lightweight Component Tags and the JavaHelp API
About the Author
Kevin Lewis holds a master's degree in technical and professional writing from Northeastern University in Boston. He has worked extensively with many online help systems and was one of the first help authors to work with JavaHelp. He offers training services in several online help technologies. Kevin has published articles on message-box design and on version-control systems for technical documents.
