Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Humble pie in academia
These are interesting observations, Eric. Naming of a book seems far more
important than what the author had in mind for the book. I've found the
same case in reviews of my _XML Topic Maps_ book. It was never written as
either a totorial, a how-to, or even a bible (whatever that means). Rather,
it was actually written before XTM itself was complete, so the best we
could do is include some interesting use cases, a simplified tutorial, and
then explore the field of knowledge representation and applications. Sad,
the reviewers never read my preface in which I explained that case fully. (01)
(sigh) indeed! (02)
Jack (03)
At 06:11 PM 10/15/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>Eric Armstrong wrote:
>
> > The full title is The JBuilder 2 Tutorial.
>
>P.S.
>If you look it up on Amazon, you'll find an "average" rating.
>
>It gets excellent marks from rank beginners -- the people
>it was designed for. It gets below average marks from
>the real experts, who wanted many more details on arcane
>aspects of JBuilder, since the book is billed as the "bible".
>
>Hardly their fault, or mine. I pleaded with the publisher not
>to title it as a "bible". But in the end, the decision was theirs.
>In point of the fact, the book was targeted at the outside as
>a step-by-step tutorial that would double as a reference
>manual by including tables of detailed information.
>
>Unfortunately, though, the result has been a reputation of
>average proportions, rather than the stellar evaluation it
>gets from the folks it was actually designed for.
>
>(Sigh...) (04)
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XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web.
Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-74960-2. (05)
http://www.nexist.org/wiki/User0Blog (06)