Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog

I was just flipping through a new book on a specific mainstream technology from a major publisher. The topic is interesting to me and the book looks like it's probably fine, but I'll never know, because it's over 600 pages and I don't have the time to devote to this topic. I don't want to pick on this book, because it's not just this one, but pretty much all mainstream tech books.

It reminded me of this Martin Fowler post on Duplex Book style. In describing a new 883 page book:

But xUnit Test Patterns isn't as scary as it looks, because it's actually two books in one set of covers. [...] The first book is a narrative book, designed to be read "cover to cover". The narrative book is something small enough to be digestible, in xUnit Test Patterns it's 181 pages [...]. The second book is reference material, which is designed not be be read cover to cover (although some people do) but instead to be dipped into when needed. The idea is that you read the narrative book to get a good understanding of the field, then put it on your shelf so it's handy to grab when you need to delve into the reference section.

This is the style that the GoF Design Patterns book is written in as well, and I think it works great. Fowler goes on to talk about what it would mean to fully embrace the style (e.g. should it be physically two books, should the reference part be online only).

Fowler and the GoF probably both use this style because it's used by Christopher Alexander (the architect whose patterns books the software pattern movement borrows from heavily). In A Pattern Language, Alexander describes how the form of the patterns is designed for skimming through them -- each pattern has a bolded introductory paragraph, a bolded solution paragraph, and a labeled diagram of the solution. You only need to read the rest of the chapter if you are interested in the details.

But even without embracing duplex styles, I think tech books could be much shorter. Here's a list of some of the books on my shelf that look a half-inch wide (about the 200 page range):

• The C Programming Language, by Kernighan and Ritchie
• UML Distilled, by Martin Fowler
• JavaScript: The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford
• Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds
• The Non-Designer's Design Book, by Robin Williams
  

I consider these books to be essential, and find myself picking them up over and over. Even the next step up in thickness (Designing Interfaces, by Jenifer Tidwell and Programming Collective Intelligence, by Toby Segaran) are very quick and enjoyable reads.

I'd like to see publishers try a 200 page book for topics that they usually address with a 600+ page one, and perhaps consider duplex styles if they feel they need to deliver a larger book. The issue is that they'd be going against the grain, but if they genuinely did a great job in a shorter format, I think the word of mouth would help -- like it did for O'Reilly's Head First series.