Tim,

I would like your opinion on an issue that I recently ran into. Some of your books come in a series, such as the Perl books. A reader can progress from Learning Perl to Programming Perl to Advanced Perl Programming. A fellow technical writer is designing training material for his department and has been denied access to the prerequisite course's training material. I decided to go out on a limb and ask you, as a respected authority on the subject, what your opinion is on this issue. Is there value in offering books and other training materials as a series? Or do you feel that detracts from the book by setting up too many expectations?

I appreciate your time in answering this email.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey Shank

Well, this reminds me of an incident from the days when I was a technical writing consultant. In my quest to improve the documentation for one client, I thought that the training department would be a natural ally. "Let me see your training materials," I said. They replied, "No way! If you improve the documentation with the information that we have in the training materials, we'll have to rewrite our courses!" Score: Training department: 1; customer: 0.

That was one of the things that led me to start my own publishing company--so I could focus on the needs of the user, not the needs of the vendor.

And yes, I do think it can make sense to consider books and training sessions in series. At O'Reilly, we always try to look at all our products as a family. If we have two books that might overlap, we try to get the authors working together to understand and minimize the overlap. Why should either the author or the reader waste time dealing with material that's already covered? Coordination makes a lot of sense. Knowing what has already been covered elsewhere, you can build on it instead. That being said, there are other forms of coordination besides a strict series.

My overall advice is for you and the author of the other course to work together to come up with a plan to maximize the user's benefit. What that plan should be will depend on the material and the goals of your respective courses.

Tim

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