DITA Books

A listing of current books on DITA that are available, with the most-recent titles listed first. The descriptions are those provided by the publishers.

If I am missing anything, email me and let me know!

DITA Metrics 101

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Whether you’re a content strategist or documentation specialist looking to justify the purchase of tools and services to enable the implementation of new processes, or an executive wanting to understand how implementing a content strategy can help a corporation achieve its corporate goals — this book is for you!

You’ve probably read articles or papers that proclaim the benefits of moving your content to DITA: accuracy, consistency, increased productivity, reduced authoring times, etc.

But you need to know by how much. How much savings? How much increased productivity? How much for YOUR project, YOUR content? Because yours is different from everyone else’s. What is your project going to cost with DITA and content reuse? And if you’re currently using or recently implemented DITA, how do you track the success of the project?

Follow the steps in this book to create custom models that estimate the cost of your content in DITA and the cost of your new processes that support the DITA content lifecycle. Then, use these models to predict the cost of your documentation project. Compare your current costs to your costs using DITA. That difference is your savings and you’ll likely find that this number alone can be used justify to justify switching to DITA and structured content.”

DITA for Practitioners Volume 1

“DITA expert Eliot Kimber takes you inside the DITA XML standard, explaining the architecture and technology that make DITA unique.

Volume 1 of his two-volume exploration of DITA starts with a hands-on explanation of end-to-end DITA processing that will get you up and running fast. Then, he explores the DITA architecture, explaining maps and topics, structural patterns, metadata, linking and addressing, keys and key references, relationship tables, conditional processing, reuse, and more.

Kimber’s unique perspective unwraps the puzzle that is DITA, explaining the rationale for its design and structure, and giving you an unvarnished, detailed look inside this important technology.”

DITA Best Practices

Links: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, Barnes & Noble

“The Start-to-Finish, Best-Practice Guide to Implementing and Using DITA

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is today’s most powerful toolbox for constructing information. By implementing DITA, organizations can gain more value from their technical documentation than ever before. Now, three DITA pioneers offer the first complete roadmap for successful DITA adoption, implementation, and usage.

Drawing on years of experience helping large organizations adopt DITA, the authors answer crucial questions the “official” DITA documents ignore, including: Where do you start? What should you know up front? What are the pitfalls in implementing DITA? How can you avoid those pitfalls?”

Introduction to DITA: Second Edition

“This new 2011 edition of the bestselling Introduction to DITA includes DITA 1.2 mechanisms, including keyref, conkeyref, constraint mechanism, and more information to bring DITA users up to date. The tutorial lessons guide you step-by-step through the learning process from developing information topics and maps through content reuse mechanisms and modifying the DITA environment to better meet your needs.

We’ve added a lot to the Second Edition—about 100 pages worth of new content (and for the same price as the first edition). It’s been a big job, started long before the official release of the DITA 1.2 specification in late 2010. As a founder and member of the DITA Technical Committee, I have long known about the new additions to the DITA framework that would especially interest communication professionals.

The Second Edition adds discussions and exercises relating to features introduced in the DITA 1.1 and 1.2 specifications:

• Bookmaps
• Glossary topics
• Content reuse mechanisms, including conref push and range and keyref

Authoring environment modifications, including document-type shells, constraints, and controlled attribute values
In addition to the new DITA mechanisms, we reviewed all content in the first edition in light of emerging best practices in the use of DITA. We modified examples and exercises that conflicted with current accepted standards and inserted recommendations to guide you in developing good habits from the start.

Recognizing that many use this guide as a tutorial, we also enhanced the end-of-lesson review questions, taking advantage of DITA 1.2′s learning and training assessment topic and its supported question types.

Finally, taking into account comments and suggestions from readers of the first edition, we clarified confusing concepts and expanded exercises to include more commonly used elements. All content was tested and verified with the DITA Open Toolkit.”

The DITA Style Guide

“As more companies implement DITA to streamline the development of technical content, the demand for DITA-literate technical communicators is growing. The DITA Style Guide: Best Practices for Authors provides comprehensive, practical explanations of DITA elements and attributes. Real-world examples and clear recommendations show you how to create consistent, semantically correct DITA content.

The DITA Style Guide: Best Practices for Authors is designed to help DITA authors implement DITA consistently by providing an authoritative reference (in the same way that The Chicago Manual of Style provides a reference for matters of language, writing and presentational style).

The DITA Style Guide is not an exhaustive set of rules or guidelines; it addresses the most common questions that DITA users ask, based on analysis of the Yahoo! DITA Users Group mailing list. The DITA Style Guide is not authoring-tool specific, so by necessity it uses neutral code examples, rather than examples of what might appear in a WYSIOO editor, or other tool-specific interactions. There are many practical examples, most built around a fictitious car manual.”

Practical DITA, 2nd. Ed.

“This book presents a practical approach to creating information using the Darwinian Information Typing Architecture (DITA). It covers everything from planning the project to writing the topics that comprise an information set.

The second edition contains information about the DITA 1.2 features.”

DITA 101 2nd Edition

“If you’re in the process of implementing DITA, expect to do so in the future, or just want to learn more about it without having to wade through technical specifications, this is the book for you.

This book covers everything you need to know about DITA.”

The Compass: Essential Reading about XML, DITA, and Web 2.0, 2nd. Ed.

“Your guide to modern technical communication These white papers, also available at scriptorium.com, introduce you to critical tools and technologies, including structured authoring, Extensible Markup Language (XML), the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and the DITA Open Toolkit, and user-generated content (blogs, wikis, and forums). The Compass provides essential information about the direction of technical publishing today. NOTE: The Compass is a compilation of white papers that are also available free at scriptorium.com. The book does not contain different or updated content.”

Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, Arbortext Edition

“As DITA becomes further entrenched as an ever more popular XML solution to topic-based authoring, a number of XML editors are available to assist content creators. This user guide is designed to provide its readers with a task-oriented approach to learning the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). In this edition, we introduce you to PTC’s Arbortext Editor. Procedures and examples in this book use Arbortext Editor. You will find conceptual overviews, background information, tutorials, and the sample XML markup you need to get started using DITA. You learn to use DITA at the same time you learn to apply the Arbortext Editor to authoring, conditional processing, and publishing. Here are some of the questions we help you answer: How do I create DITA topics? How do I assemble DITA topics into DITA maps for output? How do I do conditional processing with DITA? How do I create my own specializations? How do I use the DITA Open Toolkit?”

Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture

“A user guide for the popular OASIS DITA standard. If you have been using DITA, or are just joining the DITA community, this book provides you with the information you need to accomplish your goals. The user guide not only presents the basic methodology of DITA and its benefits for creating your information set, but explains step-by-step how to author DITA XML topics, create maps for your deliverables, and work through the production processing tasks. The book includes a thorough explanation of the DITA model and the major elements used to create your topics using the task, concept, and reference information types. Procedures and examples in this book use XML code. The DITA User Guide uses a task-based approach (the user guide is written with DITA) to help you create topic-based output. Here are some of the questions we help you answer: How do I create DITA topics? How do I assemble DITA topics into DITA maps for output? How do I do conditional processing with DITA? How do I create my own specializations? How do I use the DITA Open Toolkit?”