This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: Only publishers care about the last 20% Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

In the second Ruby on Rails podcast, Scott Barron interviews Dave Thomas about a lot of good stuff including how the Beta Book project came to be. And Dave tells how he initial held the typical publisher position: "We can't release something before it's done. Typos and errors will leave a bad impression and people will hate us."

While that may be true for some established branches of technology (can't very well do a less-than-super-polished book on regular expressions today), it's a certainly not for emerging technologies — especially those coming out of the open source communities.

There's a reason we've blasted past 5,000 orders on the Agile Web Development with Rails book in no time at all. While I believe that Rails is (much) better documented than most open source projects, it still belongs to a culture that places code highest and which often leaves documentation to linger or be incomplete.

And even if the documentation is all there, it's spread out across the wiki, the API, the tutorials, the weblogs, the mailing list, and even IRC logs. To get a sane narrative, you have to dig a little. Collect your own mosaic. If you have the time, inclination, and motivation of course.

You can also just choose to pay someone else for all the work. And contrast those scenarios for a moment. Scourge the resources online and put together the puzzle yourself (undoubtedly hours of work). Versus paying an excellent author like Dave Thomas $20-45 to get a "on rails" reading experience where you just turn pages to learn.

How much do you think people care about an off comma or page break if the alternative is doing all the work themselves? Only the publishers and their caring for the craft of creating beautiful books. We, the readers, just want the information faster, so we can get up to speed with less pain.

And we don't necessarily want the bible every time. There are a lot of niche topics that makes for great focused documentation efforts too. That's the mini-book project that Dave is talking about that I've also been pushing on big time.

Of course, once we get started, who says that the current, predominant delivery forms of the documentation are even the way go? I've been pushing ideas in that space to publishers willing to listen as well.

I want to consume better documentation in a variety of forms and quality levels. Hopefully success stories like the AWDR book will encourage more publishers to experiment. It's never been cheaper to do so or more likely to succeed.