http://tc.eserver.org/publisher/O'Reilly_and_Associates A listing of works published by O'Reilly and Associates in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/O'Reilly_and_Associates http://tc.eserver.org/35050.html http://tc.eserver.org/35050.html Today the HTML conversation is reborn. Standards development around HTML seems to actually have a chance of influencing user experience in the browser, and Microsoft itself is participating in the HTML 5 conversation despite still holding roughly two-thirds of the browser market. While Microsoft's market share is only slowly eroding, developer mindshare seems to have shifted decisively to the band of WHATWG upstarts, Microsoft's competitors. http://tc.eserver.org/35051.html http://tc.eserver.org/35051.html Bantamweight publishing is popular among those who feel brevity is a virtue. But when an entire work of art is bounded in 140 characters, even brevity has its limits. Sometimes, squeezing in a proper attribution through editing content can change the original meaning, when the edits unwillingly shift from cosmetic to substantive. http://tc.eserver.org/34655.html http://tc.eserver.org/34655.html A screencast is a digital movie in which the setting is partly or wholly a computer screen, and in which audio narration describes the on-screen action. It's not a new idea. The screencaster's tools—for video capture, editing, and production of compressed files—have long been used to market software products, and to train people in the use of those products. What's new is the emergence of a genre of documentary filmmaking that tells stories about software-based cultures like Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and content remixing. These uses of the medium, along with a new breed of lightweight software demonstrations, inspired the collaborative coining of a new term, screencast. http://tc.eserver.org/34656.html http://tc.eserver.org/34656.html In general, screencasting is a three-step process: capture of audio and video, editing, and production of a compressed deliverable. Camtasia combines all three functions in a single, integrated application, but in principle they're separable. I can imagine using Camtasia (or an equivalent) for capture, Premiere (or an equivalent) for editing, and Camtasia (or an equivalent) to produce a compressed .SWF file. http://tc.eserver.org/34017.html http://tc.eserver.org/34017.html Free software is not free - it comes with an implicit obligation that you respect the rights of its creators, and that you give something back from your use of the software, from code libraries to promotion to documentation, to the larger community. It's possible, indeed probable, that this ethos, derived by programmers and engineers to solve some very real problems, may in fact be a sound model on which to build an economy. http://tc.eserver.org/33852.html http://tc.eserver.org/33852.html To understand how much content effluvia we're subjected to, I wanted to see how many links are on the homepage of popular websites. For example, if I go to the homepage of the Huffington Post, I see 720 links, in one shot. Then click inside to a story and you've nearly doubled that number—it ads up pretty quickly. What about the tech blogs? BoingBoing Gadgets, 514. Gizmodo, 468. Engadget 432, all on one page. And on average, fewer than 1% of the links on news sites and blogs actually point to rich content, 99% are navigation and other article headlines. Aggregation site Techmeme has a whopping 1081 links. http://tc.eserver.org/33725.html http://tc.eserver.org/33725.html I've been working on the Python Module of the Week series since March of 2007. During the course of the project, my article style and tool chain have both evolved. I now have a fairly smooth production process in place, so the mechanics of producing a new post don't get in the way of the actual research and writing. Most of the tools are open source, so I thought I would describe the process I go through and how the tools work together. http://tc.eserver.org/33727.html http://tc.eserver.org/33727.html It’s hard to go to a content management or publishing technology conference these days without there being a presentation on DITA — the Darwinian Information Typing Architecture. For the uninitiated, DITA is an XML architecture for authoring and publishing topic-based content, typically technical documentation. The brainchild of IBM, where it is used internally for many documentation projects, DITA is now an open-source standard under the aegis of OASIS. http://tc.eserver.org/33705.html http://tc.eserver.org/33705.html This webcast is for those publishers who have made the decision to pursue digital channels for their content. What tools are out there? What do all those acronyms mean? How can publishers implement new strategies without disrupting current workflows? Here we explore the alphabet soup of digital publishing, sort out the tools that are most useful, and help publishers find some solid ground. http://tc.eserver.org/33632.html http://tc.eserver.org/33632.html Within the realm of computational semantics, there is still a fairly broad disconnect between triple pair semantics, the use of RDF (or turtle notation) to create atomic assertions, and the realm of semantics as reflected on the web. I do not expect this to change much in 2009, save perhaps that the gulf between the two will likely just get wider. http://tc.eserver.org/33462.html http://tc.eserver.org/33462.html If you need a job, then you might look for companies that have never had a professional technical writer working for them. It may require making calls or networking with friends or former co-workers. Most companies have a ton of writing to do. Usually they put off their documentation requirements and their needs have piled up. You may also find that someone such as a regulator has confronted management about insufficient documentation and they have to put a writer to work immediately. http://tc.eserver.org/27552.html http://tc.eserver.org/27552.html Put a new shine on your web applications. Tired of clunky web interfaces and waiting around for a page to reload? Well, it’s about time to give your web apps that pine-scented desktop application feel. What are we talking about? Just the newest thing to hit the Web: Ajax—asynchronous JavaScript and XML—and your ticket to building rich Internet applicationsthat are more interactive,responsive, and easy to use. So, grab your trial-size Ajax,included with every copy of Head Rush Ajax:we’re about to put some polish on your web apps. http://tc.eserver.org/27452.html http://tc.eserver.org/27452.html Therefore, the major difference in worldview between open source advocates and proprietary software license advocates is explainable as a differing opinion on the correct value of the volatility of maintenance and upgrade pricing. People who believe that the pricing on maintenance is stable and unlikely to change see greater intrinsic value in the software. People who fear that the pricing is subject to large fluctuations see no intrinsic value in the up-front license; stripped of the options, the license value approaches $0. http://tc.eserver.org/27040.html http://tc.eserver.org/27040.html There are several tools that can help you generate an XML Schema document from either an instance or a DTD. This hack shows you how to get the job done with little fuss. http://tc.eserver.org/27042.html http://tc.eserver.org/27042.html Use JavaScript to ensure that you write correct, well-formed XML in web pages. http://tc.eserver.org/27039.html http://tc.eserver.org/27039.html Use XSLT and SVG to offset points in X-Y scatterplots so they do not plot on top of each other. http://tc.eserver.org/27035.html http://tc.eserver.org/27035.html The nXML mode for GNU Emacs provides a powerful environment for creating valid XML documents. http://tc.eserver.org/27038.html http://tc.eserver.org/27038.html Sometimes your XML output from various programs is less than attractive. Spruce it up in a hurry with Xalan C++ and an identity transform. http://tc.eserver.org/27059.html http://tc.eserver.org/27059.html Some types of searching operations stand apart from others in that they represent a different way of thinking about searching. Perhaps you're displaying a result set one page at a time. Half of that problem is to identify (search for) the entire set of records that you want to display. The other half of that problem is to repeatedly search for the next page to display as a user cycles through the records on a display. Your first thought may not be to think of pagination as a searching problem, but it can be thought of that way, and it can be solved that way; that is the type of searching solution this chapter is all about. http://tc.eserver.org/27057.html http://tc.eserver.org/27057.html A function is a special type of command word in the SQL99 command set. In effect, functions are one-word commands that return a single value. The value of a function can be determined by input parameters, as with a function that averages a list of database values. But many functions do not use any type of input parameter. http://tc.eserver.org/27058.html http://tc.eserver.org/27058.html Even if the vast number of end users leads to high calculation loads outside the database, you can generally throw hardware at the application load (the load outside the database, that is), hanging as many application servers as necessary off the single central database. http://tc.eserver.org/27033.html http://tc.eserver.org/27033.html OpenOffice provides a suite of applications whose native file format consists of a set of XML files, compressed into a ZIP archive. This article explores the basics of the OpenOffice file format. http://tc.eserver.org/27034.html http://tc.eserver.org/27034.html Not all characters are available on the keyboard! This hack shows you how to represent such characters in an XML document by using decimal and hexadecimal character references, and how to represent entities by using entity references. http://tc.eserver.org/27041.html http://tc.eserver.org/27041.html Use an online validator to check your RSS and Atom documents. http://tc.eserver.org/27037.html http://tc.eserver.org/27037.html If you are handling many XML documents, sometimes you need to check the differences between two or more documents. You can perform diffs of XML documents with online and command-line tools. http://tc.eserver.org/27036.html http://tc.eserver.org/27036.html If you are a Microsoft Access user, you'll be happy to know that you can export Access 2003 data as XML. http://tc.eserver.org/26117.html http://tc.eserver.org/26117.html This section will show you how to insert text, symbols, and special characters; select characters, words, and paragraphs; and copy and paste text. This section also covers methods of automatic text entry, including AutoCorrect and AutoText. http://tc.eserver.org/26102.html http://tc.eserver.org/26102.html When I first tried OOo, it was at around version 1.0.0 or 1.0.1. The help files were pathetic in those days; I described them at the time as 'badly written, badly organized, badly indexed, and frequently wrong.' To be fair, the help has improved a great deal since then, though the indexing still needs a lot of improvement. http://tc.eserver.org/26118.html http://tc.eserver.org/26118.html This section shows you how to use Word’s spelling, grammar, and research tools. You also learn how to hyphenate documents, print envelopes and labels, and work with XML. http://tc.eserver.org/26123.html http://tc.eserver.org/26123.html Word performs many behind-the-scenes actions that some people hate and some people love. You already learned about AutoRecover, which saves files in the background every few minutes. Word offers three other big automated features: AutoCorrect, Smart Cut and Paste, and background spelling and grammar check. http://tc.eserver.org/26104.html http://tc.eserver.org/26104.html OpenOffice.org Writer provides many ways to write, edit, review, and comment on documents. This chapter covers some of those techniques, plus some other tips. http://tc.eserver.org/25697.html http://tc.eserver.org/25697.html If you're in the business of writing technical documents and you've been using Word in particular, you could benefit by switching to OpenOffice.org Writer. OpenOffice.org Writer is a strong competitor to Word for both drafts and final layout (desktop publishing) of many technical documents because it combines some of the best features of Word and FrameMaker. Indeed, Writer does several things better or easier than each of them. http://tc.eserver.org/25568.html http://tc.eserver.org/25568.html In a Thursday morning keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005, Google's Adam Bosworth advocated an open model for data. Although he was not referring to open source, he expanded upon the example by explaining that customers like open source software because of the transparency. http://tc.eserver.org/25565.html http://tc.eserver.org/25565.html This article details how mozdev.org built a nonprofit organization and shows you how to do the same for your community. I'll cover fundraising, obtaining legal advice, staffing, and more. http://tc.eserver.org/25561.html http://tc.eserver.org/25561.html Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don't know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this. Until I started blogging. http://tc.eserver.org/25562.html http://tc.eserver.org/25562.html The O'Reilly Radar blog will track what we're tracking, and turn the blips into conversations. http://tc.eserver.org/25567.html http://tc.eserver.org/25567.html Kupu is an open source application, written in JavaScript, that implements a flexible, full-featured HTML editor that runs in a web page without any special plugins. Its primary use is as an embedded editor in content management systems (CMS), like Zope or Plone, where it allows users to create their own web pages. Its design is flexible enough so that you can embed it into pretty much any web application without too much difficulty. http://tc.eserver.org/25569.html http://tc.eserver.org/25569.html People who are unfamiliar with open source generally don't like evangelists--at all. This is particularly true for managers who may take the same disdain to evangelists that they take to salespeople and marketers. http://tc.eserver.org/25560.html http://tc.eserver.org/25560.html Every day it seems another article about weblogs appears in the press. At first, most of these stories seemed content to cover the personal nature of blogging. But more and more I'm seeing articles that attempt to examine the journalistic and punditry aspects of weblogs prominent in many of the so-called 'warblogs,' or sites that began in response to the events of September 11th http://tc.eserver.org/25444.html http://tc.eserver.org/25444.html This chapter is intended to provide a quick introduction to structured markup (SGML and XML). If you're already familiar with SGML or XML, you only need to skim this chapter. To work with DocBook, you need to understand a few basic concepts of structured editing in general, and DocBook, in particular. That's covered here. You also need some concrete experience with the way a DocBook document is structured. http://tc.eserver.org/25001.html http://tc.eserver.org/25001.html Search engine accuracy is important, but convenience may be more important than squeezing the last few ounces of performance out of your system. Peter Van Dijck demonstrates simple but effective query analysis, best bets, and controlled vocabularies -- tools to make your search engines more effective. http://tc.eserver.org/25003.html http://tc.eserver.org/25003.html Open source development works because of remote collaboration; developers working together despite physical distance. With mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships, in-house developers are struggling with the same issues open source developers have addressed. Mark Murphy explains some of the challenges of remote collaboration. http://tc.eserver.org/24999.html http://tc.eserver.org/24999.html Say you have a document that needs to be presented in two languages and you are the translator. While the translation is in progress, someone revises the original master document. This means you now might be working with an outdated paragraph or one no longer present in the master version. This article tries to map this problem to parallel development, which version control systems solve with the branch and merge model. You will also see how svk helps you maintain translated documents easily. http://tc.eserver.org/24997.html http://tc.eserver.org/24997.html Once you've built several MySQL databases, you'll learn some shortcuts to database design. Why stop there? Take this trick a step further and put together a generic database with a set of empty, standard tables. With a well-designed MySQL template, you can quickly assemble the basics of any database as needed. A template also allows you to focus on the more interesting aspects of a database project. http://tc.eserver.org/25002.html http://tc.eserver.org/25002.html Extreme Programming (XP) is yet another popular idea gaining press. It adapts the best ideas from the past decades of software development. Whether or not you adopt XP, it's worth considering what XP teaches. http://tc.eserver.org/25000.html http://tc.eserver.org/25000.html CVS, part of the glue that holds open source development together, is showing its age. Many competitors have emerged recently, fixing misfeatures and adding new ideas. Shlomi Fish explores several current open source version control systems that may be better than CVS for your needs. http://tc.eserver.org/24998.html http://tc.eserver.org/24998.html One of the most significant developments in the software and web development community in the past few years has been the increased use of open source software. It's vital for any programmer, web designer, or other computer professional to understand that open source licenses are not all the same. The differences between licenses can have a big impact on how you may use or distribute the software. http://tc.eserver.org/24091.html http://tc.eserver.org/24091.html One of the key differentiations between compositors and simple patterns is that compositors are patterns that don’t directly map to any individual element withinthe schema. I emphasize this distinction because it can be easy to forget when focusing on a schema instead of the instance document. http://tc.eserver.org/23894.html http://tc.eserver.org/23894.html An O'Reilly interview with Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld about their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, their work, and the field of information architecture. http://tc.eserver.org/22650.html http://tc.eserver.org/22650.html XML continues to be a hot topic among web developers. Why? Because it delivers a standardized markup that separates display and layout code from syntax, making the creation, maintenance, and parsing of documents much easier for all involved. http://tc.eserver.org/21801.html http://tc.eserver.org/21801.html Blogger's primary advantage is its simplicity--if you accept the default settings and host on BlogSpot, you can be up and running within five minutes. Once you have your blog, you'll find it's just as easy to customize it. http://tc.eserver.org/21800.html http://tc.eserver.org/21800.html Information Architect: 1) the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear; 2) a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge; 3) the emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding and the science of the organization of information. http://tc.eserver.org/21756.html http://tc.eserver.org/21756.html This chapter often uses examples of search systems from sites that allow you to search the entire Web, as well as site-specific search engines. Although these web-wide tools tend to index a very broad collection of content, it is extremely useful to study them. Of all search systems, none has undergone the testing, usage, and investment that web-wide search tools have, so why not benefit from their research? Many of these tools are available for use on local sites as well. http://tc.eserver.org/21653.html http://tc.eserver.org/21653.html In many ways, the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification represents a unique development in the history of the World Wide Web. In its inherent ability to allow richly styled structural documents, CSS is both a step forward and a step backward--but it's a good step backward, and a needed one. To see what is meant by this, it is first necessary to understand how the Web got to the point of desperately needing something like CSS, and how CSS makes the web a better place for both page authors and web surfers. http://tc.eserver.org/21657.html http://tc.eserver.org/21657.html The issue of documenting schemas—or any machine readable language—goes beyond simple additions of comments. Thereal challengeistocreateschemasthat arereadablebothdirectlybylookingat their sourcecodeandbydocumentation extraction tools. http://tc.eserver.org/21655.html http://tc.eserver.org/21655.html The task of creating and deploying web services is really not all that difficult, nor is it all that different than what developers currently do in more traditional web applications. The tendency on all platforms is to automate more and more of the gory details and tedious work in creating web services. Most programmers don't need to know the exact details of encodings and envelopes; instead, they'll simply use a SOAP toolkit such as those described here. http://tc.eserver.org/21656.html http://tc.eserver.org/21656.html Python and XML are two very different animals, each with a rich history. Python is a full-scale programming language that has grown from scripting world roots in a very organic way, through the vision and guidance of Python's inventor, Guido van Rossum. Guido continues to take into account the needs of Python developers as Python matures. XML, on the other hand, though strongly impacted by the ideas of a small cadre of visionaries, has grown from standards-committee roots. It has seen both quiet adoption and wrenching battles over its future. Why bother putting the two technologies together? http://tc.eserver.org/21654.html http://tc.eserver.org/21654.html This chapter covers the two most important tasks in working with XML: reading it into memory and writing it out again. XML is a structured, predictable, and standard data storage format, and as such carries a price. http://tc.eserver.org/21645.html http://tc.eserver.org/21645.html This chapter will take you a few steps further by showing you how to add text and markup to your result tree with XSLT templates. First, you'll addliteral text to your output. Then you'll work with literal result elements, that is, elements that are represented literally in templates. You'll also learn how to add content with the text, element, attribute, attribute-set, comment, and processing-instruction elements. In addition, you'll get your first encounter with attribute value templates, which provide a way to define templates inside attribute values. http://tc.eserver.org/21643.html http://tc.eserver.org/21643.html In this chapter we examine the RSS 0.91, 0.92, and 2.0 specifications in detail. We also show how to create your own feeds and use those created by others. http://tc.eserver.org/21642.html http://tc.eserver.org/21642.html Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a language designed to provide presentation for the content of XML documents. It is composed of three parts: XSLT, XPath, and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). In this chapter, I'll show you XSLT and the .NET assembly that deals with it, System.Xml.Xsl. But first, some background. http://tc.eserver.org/21644.html http://tc.eserver.org/21644.html This chapter focuses on the details of XML markup. It will describe the fundamental building blocks of all XML-derived languages: elements, attributes, entities, processing instructions, and more. And I'll show you how they all fit together to make a well-formed XML document. Mastering these concepts is essential to understanding every other topic in the book, so read this chapter carefully. http://tc.eserver.org/21625.html http://tc.eserver.org/21625.html If you're a developer interested only in the data-oriented side of XML, and if you don't care about document authoring (writing books, articles, manuals, love poems, Web pages, whatever), feel free to ignore this article. If, on the other hand, document authoring is important to you (you're a technical writer, an HTML markup author, manager of a documentation group, an anonymous pamphleteer) and you're trying to decide whether it would be worthwhile for you to learn XML and use it for authoring documents, stick around. What you learn might save you a lot of time and spare you from some unnecessary frustration. http://tc.eserver.org/21177.html http://tc.eserver.org/21177.html One of the most common DHTML requests I get is for a Windows Explorer-style hierarchical menu, where there's a list of topics or 'folders' that a user can click on to reveal subtopics, or 'files,' within that folder. It's a common desktop metaphor that seems ever more necessary on the Web, especially as we see navigation bars incorporating larger and more complex content while still trying to fit on the screen. Hierarchical menus are a solution to the common problem of having too many links in too small a space. http://tc.eserver.org/19438.html http://tc.eserver.org/19438.html When usability expert Jakob Nielsen proclaimed Flash was 99 percent bad, he was right on at least one account: accessibility. Until the release of Flash MX and the Flash 6 player, about 41 million disabled Web users could not take full advantage of Flash Web sites (According to World Bank in 2000). Even with Macromedia's move to support Section 508 guidelines, the government's plan for Web accessibility, the majority of Flash developers have not adopted the necessary best practices. Advertisement In previous versions of the Flash player, disabled Web users were unable to view any content generated by Flash. The Flash 6 player took a big step in this regard by retroactively providing text equivalents to the application's content. This change has allowed assistive Web browsers such as screen readers to view or speak Flash content. Many Flash developers question the need for Flash accessibility since proper accessibility requires a text-only version of existing Web content. This is a myth: images and animation can actually help users with nonvisual disabilities such as dyslexia. Flash can also benefit the blind by incorporating sound to notify the Web surfer of events. http://tc.eserver.org/19437.html http://tc.eserver.org/19437.html A discussion of the common pitfalls of web usability and information architecture, and the state of the web industry today. http://tc.eserver.org/19439.html http://tc.eserver.org/19439.html All-too-frequently an external client or an internal manager or co-worker demands interface changes. They usurp the design process -- taking the decision-making away from the experts -- and deign the interface by dictum rather than traditional development processes, to the detriment of the product. http://tc.eserver.org/12973.html http://tc.eserver.org/12973.html Turn to the index in the back of any O'Reilly book published in the last five years and chances are you're looking at the handiwork of O'Reilly's resident indexing guru, Seth Maislin. Though indexes are the most frequently fingered section of any computer book, they remain the one element most taken for granted. Those ostensibly logical, orderly columns of subject-page references belie the complexity of indexing. The craft of indexing involves much more than the mere alphabetization of a book's key words. It requires something that is at once science and art form, the product of someone painstakingly fleshing out a book's information design while copiously accounting for nuances of language and word associations. You might say an index is like a fingerprint: intricate, revealing, utterly unique.