Anyone who has written any sort of technical book or tutorial will tell you that one of the trickiest bits of doing so is picking the right example page or project to base the tutorial on. The challenge is threefold. Firstly, and most obviously, you need to pick a project that will enable you to cover all the technical points you’re trying to address in the tutorial. Secondly, you want to pick something that’s not going to be a million miles away from an actual task that the user might perform once they’ve learned the skills – it has to be relavent to your target audience. Lastly, it really helps if the subject matter is interesting.
I’m as guilty as anyone of falling foul of that last requirement. Sometimes it’s just too easy to use the example of a corporate web site again and again to illustrate your points. However, we’ve seen it all before and it’s no fun trying to learn from dull, unimaginative material. In response to both this and modern online trends, many authors have switched to using a weblog-type site in their examples, but I fear this may be more constricting, less imaginative and even more tiresome that the famed corporate outing.
It could be that I’m far too paranoid about this and boring examples aren’t actually a problem for most readers. After all, it’s the techniques that are important and in some ways it can be beneficial if the example is so boring that it fades into the background. It’s more important that the reader takes away the technique than remembers the learning experience. So I figure the only way to find out is to ask. Yes, I’m talking to you.
Are corporate web sites and other such run-of-the-mill examples in books a real turn-off? Or do they work just fine? What sort of examples would you actively like to see in a book?
If you hadn’t guessed already, I have a new book underway, so your thoughts count.
Comments
Slightly off subject I think, but my beef is when book projects and examples are so generalized or oversimplified that it’s hard to know how to apply what you’ve learned to a real world situation. Technical books are notorious for trivial examples (from Photoshop to server-side code) that you would NEVER see in the real world. I’m sure the writer’s intention was to focus on the technique or approach, but it just becomes too fake.
Unimaginative examples can be real world useful. Likewise, cutting edge original examples don’t necessarily teach me so much as entertain me. And sometimes the effort to entertain the reader just comes across as mindless chatter at best, and annoyingly self-indulgent at worse (something I don’t find you guilty of, BTW).
As a reader, the use or misuse of tired examples is not how I judge a technical book. That’s not why I’m reading it.
Many authors currently seem to use personal sites to illustrate CSS techniques. Then a week or so after publishing the book they redesign their site.
I’m not saying don’t redesign, only that if people buy your book, read it and find that the examples no longer exist online, I’d imagine they could get slightly confused?
Well if it looks nice, it won’t put me off. So your first MM example did put me off, the second was acceptable…
If you use real examples then they should last, I agree with james. So it might be better to make a good looking design especially for your book.