Jeff Atwood recently published a blog entry titled How Now to Write a Technical Book, in which he compared Charles Petzold's latest book to Adam Nathan's. In short, Charles's book - Applications = Code + Markup - lacks the color, diagrams, screen shots, and structural elements (like bullet points, tables, sidebars, and so forth) that are found throughout Adam's book, Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed. To highlight the difference in style/layout, Jeff includes screen shots from both books. Charles's text is drab and gray, Adam's is bright and dynamic. The code looks like it does in Visual Studio; the figures, headings, and bullet points help break up the flow of the text.
Jeff's analysis follows:
“Beyond the obvious benefit of full color printing, which adds another dimension to any text, it's not even close. The Nathan book is the clear winner:
- It's full of diagrams, screenshots, and illustrations showing the meaning of the code.
- The text is frequently broken up by helpful color-coded sidebars such as "digging deeper", "FAQ", and "warning".
- The code/markup snippets are smaller and easier to digest; they don't dominate page upon page of the text.
- Liberal use of bullets, tables, subheadings, and other textual elements provides excellent scannability.
- The book has a sense of humor without being obnoxious or cloying.
- Did I mention it's in color?
“The Nathan book is brilliant. It reads like a blog and competes toe-to-toe with anything you'd find on the web. Petzold's book, in contrast, is a greyscale sea of endless text and interminable code. There are so few diagrams in the book that you get a little thrill every time you encounter one. It also artificially segregates code and markup: the first half is all C# code; it's not until the second half that you see any XAML markup whatsoever, even though XAML is one of the most important new features of WPF, and the one developers will be least familiar with.“
Charles has responded to Jeff's comments via a blog entry of his own titled, The Future of Writing?
“I've been mulling over Coding Horror's analysis of two WPF books, not really thrilled about it, of course. The gist of it is that modern programming books should have color, bullet points, boxes, color, snippets, pictures, color, scannability, and color.
“Does that remind you of anything?
“Apparently the battle for the future of written communication is over. Prose is dead. PowerPoint has won.“
I don't know Charles personally, but from his online reaction it sounds like he is taking Jeff's (constructive) criticism a little too personally. And Jeff's comments do remind me of something - web developers (like myself) who develop very functional but very ugly web applications only to have customers and managers and the graphics guys come in and say, 'Holy crap, that's an ugly website, we need to add some icons and background images.' When this happens, there's two ways to response:
- Take their suggestions/comments/changes as an insult to your web development skills, or
- Realize that you do some things well (backend web development, data modeling, software architecture, etc.) and there are other things that you are not so hot at and others excel at (layout, design, usability, etc.).
Charles response sounds similar to the discourse you'll hear from a coworker who decides to response to criticism on his website's layout using option #1 above. And just like that coworker, Charles is wrong. Design matters. It doesn't trump functionality, but it does matter as design affects usability, which, for a book, is its readability. As one commenter in Jeff's entry wrote: 'I have both books and Petzold's book actually made me loose interest in WPF. It's just depressing to read that thing.'
Adam Nathan's book is published by Sams Publishing, which doesn't surprise me. I've written all but one of my books with Sams and their editors have always encouraged using different elements to break up the flow of text, be it figures, bullet points, notes, sidebars, warnings, code listings, notable quotes from the book's text, and so on. When submitting chapters for review to my editor at Sams, I found that if I had a page or more of solid text, I'd get a comment suggesting various elements to break up the text. And while my technical books with Sams were all in gray scale, I also wrote a book for Sams for the beginners market titled, Create Your Own Website. This book was in color and on every other page (or so) the margin included a sidebar that had further information or ideas for developing their own website or online tools they could use (such as validators, free images and clipart, free design templates, and so on).
For more on this discussion on this topic, check out the comments in Jeff's blog post. There's also a good entry by Phil Haack: Prose Is Dead. Long Live Prose.
(An aside - Jeff provided his own constructive criticism at my last book's title in his post, Teach Yourself ASP.NET 2.0 in 23 Hours, which highlights the flaws in titling books Learn X in TimeUnit. And while the naming scheme does have its drawbacks, I vehemently disagree with Jeff's final conclusion 'that books with titles like Teach Yourself ASP.NET 2.0 in 24 Hours cheapen our craft.' My response was a long-winded blog entry titled, Can You Learn ASP.NET in 24 Hours?)