Customer Reviews

DITA 101

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I'm halfway through this book and I'm highly disappointed that I spent $23 on it. The authors might be DITA experts, but they have no idea of how to explain it to someone.

The organization of the book is terrible. After many pages, I still don't know what DITA is for or how it's associated with XML. But I'm deep into detailed tag definitions, etc.

Explanations in the book are convoluted, confusing, and have many references to chapters and sections later in the book. Inconsistent terminology, bad sentence construction, use of technical terms that are unexplained until later in the book, and other classic examples of poor writing abound. Here's the definition of "unique content" from page 52: "Unique - Content which is unique is just that, unique."

You also need a magnifying glass (really!) to read some of the figures in the book.

The book's content might make sense to someone who's already a DITA expert. But to me (only a technical writer trying to understand what DITA is about), it's a waste of time.

This book offers a high level view of DITA and how DITA could best be used in the context of content management and a single-source environment. It readies the user to understand a more in depth course on DITA. I must admit that before reading this book, the point of DITA escaped me. Now I feel ready for the next step.

If your technical communications group is considering a move to DITA and you, or your team, don't know what DITA is and what it means to move to a DITA authoring model, this book is a great place to start.

The books does provides a comprehensive high-level overview of the technical aspects of DITA--tags, topic types, DITA maps. But, more importantly, it discusses the broader considerations when moving to DITA. The authors discuss how a DITA environment affects people. How do you plan your information development? How do you reuse information? How does DITA affect the day-to-day roles of writers and managers? What new roles might you need to define in your organization? How does it fit with a Component Content Management System (CCMS)?

It is important to remember that this is "DITA 101" and is not a graduate course on the subject. This book is a great place to start your DITA investigation. I think it would be money well spent for an organization to get a copy of this book for all their people to help shape any pending DITA implementation.

Because it has become, more or less, a standard authoring framework for technical documentation, DITA can enable many good things: reduction of translation costs, re-purposing of blocks of content, facility in porting instructional materials from one company to another, single-source writing for multiple outputs, consistency of layout and writing style across multiple documents and authors.

Technical writers sometimes revolt, sometimes just "push back," when they are introduced to DITA, or DITA-based publishing systems. They feel they are being fitted for straight-jackets. When this feeling arises, writers should remember that DITA is eminently customizable. The system administrators charged with maintaining a DITA-based publishing system can enable new types of topics, elements, and attributes that may be unique to your customers' writing needs, but that are still "DITA-legal." Writers and editors--editors especially, because you have the overview--must push back whenever the straight-jacket tightens. That can be loosened for the benefit of your audiences. However, be aware that if you adorn DITA with too many pearls, you will start losing some of its versatility and publishing power. DITA can become a tightrope where production people and system architects balance editorial people in a give-and-take performance for the benefit of the customer.

I agree both with the reviewers who say DITA 101 is a good high-level peek at DITA and also with those who say it does not provide nuts-and-bolts instruction on how to apply DITA. This is the book to read when your organization is getting ready to deploy DITA, or when you are getting ready to learn how to author in the DITA environment. It is not an instruction manual.

Oh, DITA was invented at IBM and it stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Go figure.

The title of the book describes it all. "DITA 101, Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers" by A. Rockley, S. Manning and C. Cooper is an excellent introduction to DITA for authors AND managers as well as those who want or need to understand it. In this primer, you will find out what DITA is and why you should go for it (or why not!). It also covers how to work with DITA both from a management and technical communicators perspective. Unlike many other books, you will not find loads of XML tagging even though it uses practical examples to ease the understanding. In this quick read and well written 150-page book, the authors provide a basic background to DITA that allows one to explore further into the subject or simply understand what's behind it. This book will definitively be on the top of my list for recommended reading as an entry level overview to DITA.

This book answers the ultimate question. Is DITA right for you? And if so, how do you make the move to DITA. Though the book is intended for beginners getting up to speed on DITA, it is full of valuable nuggets for DITA intermediates and experts because of the scope that is covered.

When I started reviewing this book, I dove into the table of contents, drilled into the "Planning for DITA" chapter and found the "Roles and responsibilities" chapter. Now I am really getting excited, but at the time, I didn't know exactly why.

Well, learning the details and syntax of the DITA language is not enough. There are many other parts to the puzzle of creating documentation using the DITA methodology. This book helps you make the transition from authoring long narrative monolithic documents to topic and component-based collaborative authoring. This book shows you how to analyze the content that you already have and determine if and how it maps to DITA. "DITA 101" discusses the new and modified roles and processes needed in a collaborative authoring environment. Now you can look at your current processes and compare them to the new processes so that you, your content and your team can make the transition. Remember, it not just about the content. It's also about the people.

I think the book is appropriately titled, "DITA 101". Coming in from the 50,000 foot view point, this book offers the big picture and the right amount of information about each aspect of the big picture: content structure, processes, ROI, roles and responsibilities. From this, you will be able to determine for yourself, should you make the move to DITA, and if so, how.

"DITA 101" is a blending of what you need to know to get started in DITA and the Rockley Group's proven Unified Content Strategy. Given that DITA was designed around best practices for technical publications, that makes this book a combination of two best practices rolled into one.

Addendum: Second edition is available
-Mark Lewis
-author "DITA Metrics"