Best practices for online help book landing pages?

Subject: Best practices for online help book landing pages?
From: "Tom Johnson" <tomjohnson1492 -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2008 12:02:56 -0600

Is there a best practice for what should appear when a user clicks a book in
an online help table of contents? (By book I'm referring to the TOC folder
icon that expands to show multiple topics below it.) I've seen three
variations:

- A mini-TOC appears listing the topics under the book.
- A summary topic appears describing the entire book (and the topic isn't
listed as one of the topics in the book).
- Nothing appears at all. You have to double-click the book to see the
topics under it, and then select the topic you want.

I currently do the first -- add a miniTOC for the book's topic. But
yesterday I used a help file, saw the same thing, and thought to myself, why
the repetition of the table of contents?

Tom

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