At the beginning of this week a new book on DITA came out: DITA Best Practices, by Laura Bellamy, Michelle Carey and Jenifer Schlotfeldt. It’s subtitle nicely captures what it is about: “A Roadmap for Writing, Editing, and Architecting in DITA”, so this is clearly not just a book about the very basics of the spec or on the mechanics on tags.
The best description of it that I can find comes from the IBM Press site, which published the title:
The authors begin with topic-based writing, presenting proven best practices for developing effective topics and short descriptions. Next, they address content architecture, including how best to set up and implement DITA maps, linking strategies, metadata, conditional processing, and content reuse. Finally, they offer “in the trenches” solutions for ensuring quality implementations, including guidance on content conversion.
Sounds interesting, and I liked what I say and heard from two of the authors at the last DITA North America conference I attended back in the Spring, which was on DITA code reviews.
I have also put together a short list of the books that area available in DITA, which you can find here and which I have also added to the navigation bar of this site.
For a sample, the first chapter of the book is available for viewing.
