RE: Recommending 3rd-parth books (was RE: using 3rd-party books)

["Susan W. Gallagher" <SGallagher -at- akonix -dot- com>]

Actually, I've done both. Back in my Smalltalk days, we found
an author who'd done a book on Smalltalk concentrating on a
competing product. We contracted with him to edit to our 
product. It sounded really simple, but got complicated as we
went along. 

I finally ended up managing several rewrites to make the book 
look like ours and sound "more professional". We did a complete
reformat and index and passed it off as ours. I don't know
what kind of compensation the author received. Nor did I
stick around long enough to see what the customer reaction
was. About two-thirds of the way thru the project, the doc
team was informed that thier last day would be the day the
docs were delivered (but that's a whole other story).

And when I was documenting a CORBA ORB, we routinely included
a section of recommended reading in each developer's guide.
There was no way we could teach the ins and outs of CORBA
development in a product guide. This wasn't my decision, but
I was okay with it. I'm not entirely sure any of our customers
actually read that section of the docs anyway.  ;-)

So, yes. Either way, it's been done. But only you can decide
whether it's appropriate for your product and your audience.
And if it involves any substantial rewrites, ask to review
the contract before it's signed.

-Sue Gallagher
sgallagher -at- akonix -dot- com


> We had a similar discussion around our department recently, 
> except that
> instead of including a 3rd-party book, we wanted to recommend 
> a particular
> book ... Has 
> anyone else done
> this sort of thing?...
> 

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